Category: The Tennis 128

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Andrea Jaeger [USA]
Born: 4 June 1965
Career: 1980-84
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1981)
Peak Elo rating: 2,305 (3rd place, 1981)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 11
 

* * *

Andrea Jaeger might have set more records per season in her four-plus-year tennis career than anyone else in tennis history. Virtually everything she did in her debut season of 1980 was a first for someone her age. Every age-based mark set by Tracy Austin in 1978 and 1979–and there were many–fell by the wayside when Jaeger appeared, playing a similar game, one year younger than when Austin did it.

Back when the women’s professional tour was less than a decade old, when Jennifer Capriati was just an athletically-gifted toddler, Jaeger redefined what was possible for teenagers. She was the top-ranked American among under-18s when she was 13. She turned pro and beat a slew of established veterans when she was 14. Three weeks after her 15th birthday, she was seeded at Wimbledon–where she beat Virginia Wade and reached the quarter-finals.

By the end of her debut pro season in 1980, she had reached the US Open semifinal, won three titles, and racked up wins over Austin, Wade, Martina Navratilova, Hana Mandlikova, Evonne Goolagong, and Pam Shriver. In three years, she’d be the tour’s youngest millionaire.

Jaeger and Austin came along at an opportune moment, when Chris Evert was suddenly vulnerable and Martina had yet to evolve into a superhuman destroyer of tennis players. They established a new sporting archetype–the teenage girl tennis prodigy–that would play an outsized role in the sport for another two decades. They also gave sportswriters a vocabulary to use for the next several generations of teen queens–bratty, arrogant, spoiled–that suggested the journalists were always encountering their first teenagers.

In another decade and a half, the experiences of Austin and Jaeger, coupled with the injuries and early retirements of Capriati and a host of others, were responsible for a new set of rules governing teens on tour. Now, 14-year-olds are limited to no more than eight pro events, and 15-year-olds can only play ten.

Andrea Jaeger would’ve benefited from those rules, but boy, would she have hated them.

* * *

Mary Carillo said of Jaeger: “She plays tennis like she’s double-parked.” Tour officials constantly reminded her to wait out the full length of changeovers, since that time was sold to advertisers. She wrote in her autobiography* that she had an “inexhaustible storehouse of energy,” switching sides “as if I was racing to catch up with a soccer ball.”

* Entitled First Service, proof that there truly is a tennis pun for any situation.

Jaeger first tested the professional waters when she was 14 years old, in January 1980, at the Avon Futures of Las Vegas. She had a wild card waiting for her hometown Virginia Slims event in Chicago later that month, but her father insisted that she wait to turn pro until she had proven herself at the lower level. Winners of Futures events earned two free passes into top-level Slims tournaments.

Events on the Futures circuit were free-for-alls. As the likes of Navratilova, Goolagong, and Billie Jean King played for $125,000 on the main tour in Kansas City, 199 women signed up to fight for a $25,000 pot in Vegas.

Each Avon main draw was a standard 32-player, five-round bracket, and four of those places were open to the winners of a three-round, 32-player qualifying draw. The level of competition was uneven, but every good player of the late 1970s and early 1980s made an appearance on the Avon circuit en route to bigger things. In the Las Vegas qualifying draw were future Wimbledon doubles champion JoAnne Russell and Rita Agassi, Andre’s sister.

Jaeger’s only experience was in junior tournaments, so she didn’t even merit a spot in the qualifying field. Andrea–like anyone who owned a racket–could sign up for the pre-qualifying draw, and with great hopes for the new year, 143 women did. Andrea drew a first-round bye, so to earn one of the four coveted spots in the qualifying draw, she needed to win a mere five matches.

The reigning junior champion did that and more:

PQ1: Andrea Jaeger - bye
PQ2: Jaeger d. Tracy Tanner 6-0 6-0
PQ3: Jaeger d. Debbie Brink 6-0 6-0
PQ4: Jaeger d. Betsy Blaney 6-2 4-6 6-3
PQ5: Jaeger d. Kate Brasher 6-1 6-1
PQ6: Jaeger d. Yvonna Brzakova 6-3 2-6 6-3

Q1: [Q] Jaeger d. Candy Reynolds 6-1 6-0
Q2: [Q] Jaeger d. Nancy Yeargin 6-3 6-1
Q3: [Q] Jaeger d. Renee Blount 6-2 6-4

1R: [Q] Jaeger d. [7] Rosalyn Fairbank 6-3 5-7 6-4
2R: [Q] Jaeger d. Anne Hobbs 6-2 6-4
QF: [Q] Jaeger d. Iva Budarova 6-2 6-4
SF: [Q] Jaeger d. Barbara Jordan 6-4 6-2
FI: [Q] Andrea Jaeger d. [5] Barbara Potter 7-6 4-6 6-1

Her 13 matches to win a single tournament constitute a record that still stands. She went home, turned pro, and won her first match on the big tour, beating the veteran Kathy May Teacher*, 6-3, 6-3. After a second-round loss to Kathy Jordan, she went straight to Seattle, where she reached the semi-finals on the back of victories against Rosie Casals, Wendy Turnbull, and Sue Barker. She’d never play a Futures tournament again.

* These days, Kathy is more focused on the men’s tour. Her son is the second-ranked American man, Taylor Fritz.

When Coco Gauff made her famous run through qualifying to the Wimbledon third round in 2019, she was the same age that Jaeger was in her rookie season. Gauff was able to play only four more events before the end of the year, and her entire pro campaign that year amounted to 25 matches. In 1980, Jaeger played 93.

* * *

No one questioned that Andrea Jaeger, as the record-breaking wunderkind of the tour, had a compelling story. Her game was more difficult to appreciate.

She described herself as “a defensive player,” which is a fancy way of saying she hit a lot of moonballs. My friend Jeff McFarland remembers watching Jaeger-Austin lobfests that, he says, “made curling look like F1.” In the fourth round of the 1983 US Open, she and Bonnie Gadusek subjected the crowd to a 180-shot rally.

Put the young lady on slow clay, and it’s miracle the matches ever ended. The Match Charting Project has a shot-by-shot log of the 1982 French Open semi-final, where Jaeger lost to Chris Evert. The pair averaged a whopping nine strokes per point. The nature of their play almost broke the Aggression Score metric, which rates players by how often their shots end points, for good or bad, via winner or unforced error. The usual range is from -100 for extremely passive play to +100 for nonstop aggression. Zero is average. Against Evert that day, Jaeger’s score in rallies was -142.

A rare move forward at the 1983 French Open

It was an odd choice of game style for the teenager who refused to slow down. Beating an elite defender like Evert, Jaeger, or Austin required steady concentration, and most women on tour couldn’t sustain it. Often, Andrea couldn’t either. She struggled with unpredictable conditions like gusty wind, and sometimes, internal distractions were enough on their own.

After Zina Garrison beat her early in 1983 in Houston, she said that Jaeger “always started off as if she didn’t care.” (I don’t doubt Zina, though I do wonder how Andrea pulled off a 6-2, 6-1 victory in their first meeting with that sort of attitude.) That summer, Jaeger reached her sole Wimbledon final, crushing Billie Jean King to get there. How did she do it? “I decided to concentrate on every point. I usually don’t do that, but I was determined.”

By then, Jaeger’s wavering motivation was clear to anyone who was paying attention. A 1984 Sports Illustrated profile begins with a list of seven matches that she lost easily. For most of them, she had an excuse ready, ranging from a cold to menstrual cramps. The press wasn’t convinced. One WTA official was backed so far into a corner as to say, “tanking is subjective.”

* * *

Jaeger’s run lasted a little more than four years. When we tally up all the ailments that might have knocked her off the tour between ages 14 and 18–even discounting many of them as the usual post-match gripes–it’s amazing she lasted as long as she did.

She told reporters in 1983, “I get hurt a lot because when you’re young you don’t know how to take care of yourself,” she said. “It’s like you have to get hit by a truck before you learn to look both ways.” It was an odd thing to come out of her mouth, since she was still pushing herself to the limit, playing almost 80 singles matches that season alone and complaining about nagging injuries after many of them.

At the French Open the following year, she was finally hit by that truck. Her right shoulder popped midway through her first round match, and she couldn’t continue through the pain–only the fourth mid-match retirement of her career. She would come back for the Los Angeles Olympics later that year, but her shoulder would never be the same. A few days short of her 19th birthday, her career was essentially over.

The warning signs had been blaring at her for years. A 1983 Washington Post profile by Jane Leavy detailed a list of injuries from the previous 18 months: “a pulled groin muscle, a stress fracture in her pelvis and tendinitis in both feet.” She also coped with ankle, knee, and elbow problems. She had a response ready for those who considered her a malingerer: “I’ve been hurt more than I said. It’s not like every time I get a hangnail I call UPI.”

And then there was her relationship with her father. Roland Jaeger was nearly as competitive as Andrea herself, and he was relentlessly negative–he’d even explain to you why his constant carping was the only appropriate parenting style with a daughter like his. Andrea would sometimes complain that she never got a compliment from him, but just as often, she’d leap to his defense. Even decades later, she wrote, “[H]e was there to remind me of my place.”

Overbearing tennis fathers were nothing new–the type goes back at least as far as the 1910s and Suzanne Lenglen’s father, Charles. But many people on tour recognized that things weren’t quite right. Owen Davidson, an Australian doubles specialist who had served as a coach and hitting partner, said in 1983, “What she’s going through now doesn’t surprise me at all. There are real problems there. I got out when I realized the father wasn’t playing with a full deck.”

When Jaeger reached the 1983 Wimbledon final, she had a spat with Roland that–in her telling much later–led to her father locking her out of their room. Andrea has hinted that she tanked the final the next day. Martina Navratilova, who won the championship match, 6-0, 6-3, might take issue with that. She had won seven of their last eight meetings, and as she told reporters after winning the title, “I kept reminding myself that I was playing Andrea Jaeger and I should win.”

From this distance–and perhaps from any vantage point outside the family itself–it’s tough to know exactly what toll the father-daughter relationship took on the teenage star. At least she could take solace in the fact that her dad wasn’t the worst among them. Hungarian sensation Andrea Temesvari was the closest thing Europe had to their own Andrea Jaeger, and she had an overbearing father of her own. When one reporter wanted an insider’s take on whether Otto Temesvari took things took far, he flipped through his rolodex and called someone with a bit of perspective on the subject: Roland Jaeger.

* * *

The women’s tour would’ve been better off with a healthy, happy Andrea Jaeger who stuck around for a decade or more. But Andrea’s physical and psychological struggles meant that a long career was never really an option.

It’s reassuring, then, that the story ends happily for all parties. The brief, sometimes soporific reign of Jaeger and Tracy Austin gave ammunition to critics of the women’s game, but by the time Andrea enrolled in community college in 1984, fans could point to an astonishing crop of rising stars, including Steffi Graf, Gabriela Sabatini, and a very young, promising, and oh-so-marketable Mary Joe Fernandez. Every mention of a new prospect pointed to Jaeger as a cautionary tale, and some parents and coaches took heed.

The game was in good hands. For her part, Jaeger was a 19-year-old millionaire who had spent her high school years on the road. She had plenty of time to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.

Few former greats have done better. She finished school, earning her degree in theology. For a time, she became a nun. With her winnings–along with contributions from many familiar figures in the tennis world, such as John McEnroe–she launched the Silver Lining Foundation. Since then, her life has been focused on supporting children with cancer. Her autobiography makes clear that she found her calling.

While her teen years were a mere stepping stone for Andrea, we should be careful not to understate her importance in the evolution of the women’s game and its fan base. In 1983, a Virginia Slims executive named Anna Laird said of Jaeger:

She wouldn’t have existed before 1970. Chris [Evert] became a role model for a certain generation that liked ponytails, earrings and makeup. Andrea became a role model for kids who want to be able to play soccer and watch football and know all the stats about the best pass defense. Before they had to keep it all within. Now they can afford to have male attitudes about sports and be female and be feminine. Andrea helped make it acceptable for women to have a male attitude about sports.

It’s unusual to think of Jaeger as helping bring about Billie Jean King’s vision for women’s tennis, but she came along at the right time to play her part. She managed to do so while still making sense of her own life. In 1984, tour veteran Kathy Jordan expressed her sympathy for the teens competing full-time: “The circuit is a tough place to grow up.” That Jaeger emerged from the WTA grinder to contribute so much is as impressive as anything she accomplished on court.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Rosie Casals [USA]
Born: 16 September 1948
Career: 1962-83
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1970)
Peak Elo rating: 2,274 (3rd place, 1971)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 29
 

* * *

Rosie Casals was one of the greatest doubles players of all time. She won 112 titles, half of them with lifelong friend and rival Billie Jean King. She was no slouch on the singles court either, racking up over 800 career match victories and at least 29 titles. She reached another 56 finals in a two-decade span from 1961 to 1981.

Among her singles championships are two of the most important events in the early history of professional women’s tennis. In 1970, Gladys Heldman arranged a pro tournament in Houston for the Original Nine, the women who were so outraged by the staggering difference between men’s and women’s prize money at the prestigious Pacific Southwest that they opted for an upstart event instead. Casals beat Judy Dalton in the final to secure the $1,600 first prize.

Three years later, Rosie claimed the title at the first-ever women’s event with a six-figure purse. At the 1973 Family Circle Cup on Hilton Head Island, Casals edged Billie Jean King in the semi-finals and squeaked past Nancy Richey in the final, 3-6, 6-1, 7-5.

She was more often the bridesmaid. She lost to King 50 times, Margaret Court 32 times, and Chris Evert 21 times in 22 matches. (As a consolation, she was 29-0 against Val Ziegenfuss.) Rosie peaked at #3 in the accepted rankings of the day, and she more often found herself in the back half of the top ten. Not bad for a largely self-taught woman from a working-class family who stood a mere 5-foot-2.* In fields with all-time greats such as King, Court, Richey, Evonne Goolagong, and Virginia Wade, every second- or third-place finish counts as a triumph.

* and a quarter!

Yet the talented Casals got tagged early on with the “underachiever” label. Depending on who explains it, she was too short, insufficiently motivated, psyched out by King, or–this one comes from Rosie herself–“too creative.”

Billie Jean even danced on the line of calling her friend lazy. Counterfactuals are tricky–maybe Casals could’ve achieved more had she worked harder off the court. But a look at her record throughout the 1970s, and especially in the early part of the decade as independent professional women’s tennis found its footing, suggests that she was working as hard on the court as anyone in the game.

* * *

First, the charges. King wrote in an early autobiography:

It did sort of irritate me when people wrote all that junk about Rosie getting psyched out by me when it counted. … I was not only a much better player than Rosie, but she was also much lazier.

I often told her–and remember we were doubles partners for seven straight years–that if she were going to try and play the net game, as short as she was, even far shorter than I, then she was going to have to be five times better conditioned than anybody else. But she didn’t want to hear that. Rosie was quite content being number five or six in the world. … She’d rather have a good time with her friends. You know what Rosie loves the best in all the world? Amusement parks. I’ll bet she’s been to every one on the face of the earth that’s worth anything.

Billie Jean has become more circumspect over the years, and Casals’s work ethic didn’t come up in King’s recent book, All In. The author gives herself credit for surviving a killing schedule in 1971 as she played alongside Rosie in the first full season of the Virginia Slims tour:

Despite the relentless schedule, I took seventeen of the thirty-one singles titles I played for and had a 112–14 record. If you tossed in the twenty-two doubles titles I won, nearly all of them with Rosie, I easily played more matches that year than Johnny Bench played baseball games (149).

All those titles, combined with the steadily growing prize purses for women’s tennis, meant that King became the first female player to earn more than $100,000 in a season. Rosie won enough to come in third in the prize money race. She earned $62,000–over $400,000 in present-day dollars.

She did it by matching Billie Jean’s workload every step of the way. King played 126 matches… Casals played 123. King won 22 doubles titles… so did Rosie. (They won 19 together, and Casals added two with Judy Dalton and one with Françoise Dürr.) I don’t have complete doubles results for every event that year, but she may have lost as few as four doubles matches in the entire season. Oh, and when one event was short of ballkids, Rosie filled in.

Casals (left) and King at Wimbledon in 1972

Rosie’s schedule was almost as demanding again in 1973, and from 1974 to 1978, she tacked on as many as 44 World Team Tennis ties each year to the regular tournament season. No woman played as many events on the 1971-78 Virginia Slims tour. At the end of her 1974 WTT campaign for the Detroit Loves, she said, “Everybody’s tired.”

* * *

There’s a persistent narrative throughout tennis history that the best shotmakers tend to have flighty personalities and fail to live up to their potential. You rarely hear Novak Djokovic called a “great shotmaker”–though of course he is–because he’s also so good at everything else. Even when an all-time great like John McEnroe is recognized for his spectacular physical feats, commentators tend to seize on what the athletic genius didn’t do. Somehow, McEnroe’s career, with its seven singles majors, has gone down in history as a disappointment.

So it is with Rosie Casals. Veteran Australian coach Harry Hopman watched her as an 18-year-old and pronounced her the best junior prospect in the world. Bud Collins called her the greatest shotmaker in women’s tennis history. She didn’t live up to the billing, reaching only two major singles finals and losing both.

Short women had a better chance in the game of the 1970s than they do today–Billie Jean was only 5-foot-4. But even then, the deck was stacked against someone as small as Casals. A 5-foot-2-inch netrusher could just barely survive in the 1970s game, and to do so, she needed an extensive bag of tricks. Journalist Grace Lichtenstein, who wrote a book about the 1973 season, said she was “among the most powerful and the most acrobatic, with an overhead that could take the cover off a ball and a few flat-on-the-floor and behind-the-back shots that hadn’t been named yet.”

Casals on the run in 1974

Margaret Court was rarely one to give unnecessary praise, but she snuck some into a backhanded compliment: “[S]he gets around the court pretty well, too. She’s built so close to the ground, you know.”

If Rosie wanted to convince the public that she was more than just an impulsive raw talent, she didn’t exactly help her own cause. She would grab cigarettes from fans after matches, and she was often seen with a post-game beer in hand. Later, she switched to cigars. After dropping the first set to a player she should’ve beaten easily in 1973, she said, “Shit, I just forget how to play from day to day, and it takes me a set to learn again.”

King puts it down to fundamentals:

On the court she loved to discover new ways to hit the ball, but she never really worked hard enough on developing the kind of sound, basic game you need to reach the very top. All champions, I think, have one great shot, what I call their bread-and-butter shot, the one they can call on at any time to get them through a crisis. With Rosie, there wasn’t any. Very flash on everything, very colorful. But also very erratic–and just not conscientious enough.

You can see why Rosie eventually sought out other doubles partners.

* * *

Despite all the ups and downs–or maybe because of them–Casals was made for professional tennis. She came from a poor family of El Salvadorean immigrants, and she often felt out of place among the country club set that represented so much of tennis in the 1960s. Even in the Bay Area, with its ample supply of public courts and history of middle-class stars, she was an outsider.

Before the start of the Open Era in 1968, it was possible for a few of the best female players to make a good living from federation stipends and under-the-table payments from “amateur” tournaments, but the economy was extremely top-heavy. Some estimates suggest that a superstar such as King or Court was able to make $25,000 a year, while most of their opponents barely covered expenses. As the Virginia Slims tour became established, Billie Jean said, “The money wasn’t important, but the principle involved was.” Rosie would’ve agreed with the second part of that statement, but I doubt she was on board with the first.

Casals jumped at the chance to be one of the four women in George McCall’s pioneering women’s pro tour in 1968 and 1969. And even later, when the entire circuit turned professional, a quirk of the Slims tour offers an interesting illustration of how Casals performed when there was money on the line.

The 1970s Virginia Slims events offered an extra attraction on the final day of tournaments. In addition to the singles and doubles finals, the semi-final losers would play a match (usually a pro set to eight games) to determine the third-place finisher. The winner took home more money. To give an example at random: In the third-place match at the 1973 Virginia Slims of Columbus, Georgia, Julie Heldman beat Rosie, 8-5, and received a check for $1,950. Fourth place was only good for $1,650, $300 less.

The loss to Heldman was an aberration. Casals played more of those third-place matches than anyone else, and she won at a rate just behind only King and Betty Stöve. Here are the ten women who contested the most third-place matches, sorted by wins:

Player               Matches  Record  Win %  
Rosie Casals              38   28-10  73.7%  
Virginia Wade             25   15-10  60.0%  
Kerry Reid                18    13-5  72.2%  
Betty Stöve               12    10-2  83.3%  
Nancy Richey              11     6-5  54.5%  
Billie Jean King           8     6-2  75.0%  
Martina Navratilova       10     5-5  50.0%  
Julie Heldman              9     5-4  55.6%  
Françoise Dürr            11     3-8  27.3%  
Wendy Overton              7     1-6  14.3%

Even though semi-final losers often ended up in the consolation round due to fatigue or minor injury, Rosie skipped the third-place match only once.

* * *

Casals loved the pro ranks, and fans in the evolving, rowdier era adored her in return.

Lichtenstein wrote:

You didn’t applaud a Rosie Casals, you cheered her until your throat got hoarse, because that’s what her game was all about. Even more than Billie Jean, Rosie brought gut-clutching excitement to the women’s game, an excitement that was the natural extension of her personality.

Rosie embraced the chaos of World Team Tennis, which encouraged spectators to get involved. There were no requests of “quiet, please,” and cheap beer ensured that the crowd wouldn’t heed one anyway. Casals recognized that WTT appealed to would-be fans like she used to be, “the common person” who would feel out of place at a country club and would never travel to Wimbledon or Forest Hills.

And she wasn’t afraid to jump in the fray. In 1974, she said, “Hecklers don’t bother me. I’m glad I’ve played well enough to make them mad as hell.” She once responded to catcalls by launching a serve into the grandstand.

She also rarely hesitated to speak her mind. She was one of the few women professionals who were vocally committed to the women’s lib movement, while Billie Jean–who put her tennis first and feared alienating the masses by moving too fast–set a more cautious standard. This is the woman who, in the run up to the Battle of the Sexes, called Bobby Riggs “an old, obnoxious has-been … who can’t hear, can’t see, walks like a duck and is an idiot besides.”

* * *

Casals never turned into a has-been. While she eased off the singles tour in the early 1980s, she continued to play doubles at an elite level. She reached five major finals with Wendy Turnbull between 1980 and 1983, and they were crowned champions at the 1982 US Open. She won her last tour-level doubles title in 1988, aged 39, partnering another ageless wonder, Martina Navratilova.

Rosie was one of a kind, and the players who came after her made her look even more unique. In a 1982 interview, she told the New York Times, “There’s not enough contrast from No. 1 down to No. 100. Too many people play the same now.”

In the presence of WTA royalty 💜@SabalenkaA and @paulabadosa posed with Rosie Casals ahead of their match. pic.twitter.com/tx2PeYmerA

— wta (@WTA) November 12, 2021

The trend has continued. Certainly there are no modern contenders of her stature. Even with 5-foot-5-inch Ashleigh Barty atop the ranking table, no one shorter than Camila Osorio’s 5-foot-4 ranks in the top fifty. In a 2019 podcast with Carl Bialik, Casals said there were no modern players who reminded her of herself. Unfortunately, she’s right. Today’s women’s game is thriving, but a modern-day Rosie Casals would make it even better.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Ted Schroeder [USA]
Born: 20 July 1921
Died: 26 May 2006
Career: 1938-51
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1949)
Peak Elo rank: 2 (1948-49)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 25
 

* * *

The amateur era produced some weird-looking careers. Travel was more expensive and time-consuming–especially before the dawn of commercial airlines–so only a small number of players took part in any kind of global circuit of the sort we’d recognize today. And many players had jobs! Not cushy gigs with equipment manufacturers like the faux-sponsorships enjoyed by generations of Australian stars, but actual, butt-in-chair-by-nine occupations.

So players compromised. Every tournament they played incurred a direct cost to work or family, and travel funding was often touch-and-go. Viewed in this light, it’s no surprise to find the record books full of partial seasons. Many elite competitors semi-retired in their mid-20s or earlier, entering only local tournaments as their professional and family lives moved on.

Add that mix of conflicting forces to the global maelstrom of World War II, and you can begin to explain the career of Ted Schroeder.

Schroeder came on the scene as a local teen star in Southern California, often playing doubles with exact contemporary and lifelong friend Jack Kramer. He played tournaments throughout his time as a student at Southern Cal and Stanford, winning the national intercollegiate title in 1942, the same year he graduated. The cherry on top of his breakthrough year came at Forest Hills, where he defeated the veteran Frank Parker in five sets to become the national champion. The New York Times called the final “one of the most enthralling matches the tournament ever has provided.”

Two days later, he got measured for a Navy uniform. He wouldn’t play another major for seven years.

* * *

Toward the tail end of this year’s Australian Open, a surprising stat made the rounds. In the Open Era, no man has won the next major immediately after winning his first title at that level. Andy Murray was the first to come close, following up his initial slam championship with a final. Daniil Medvedev had a chance to surpass Murray in Australia, but he fell just short of adding a second title to his 2021 US Open winner’s trophy.

Like Murray and Medvedev, Ted Schroeder didn’t start his major-winning career with back-to-back titles. I’ve already told you that after his first slam, he didn’t play another major for seven years. With Wimbledon and the Australian Championships suspended for the duration of the war and the French converted to an ersatz Championships of Occupied France, there weren’t many opportunities. Some elite players in the US military were able to take leave to play their national tournament, but in 1943, Schroeder was not among them. Instead, his undefended title went to Joe Hunt, who himself would not be able to return in 1944 and would die in a plane crash before the end of the war.

Back-to-back first and second majors were more common before 1968, at least when war didn’t get in the way. In the half-century after World War I, nine men won the major right after the one where they claimed their first big title. It’s an impressive list: Tilden, Lacoste, Perry, Budge, Riggs, Frank Parker, Budge Patty, Rosewall, Hoad, and Newcombe. Parker comes with an asterisk, because he grabbed his first two titles at Forest Hills in 1944 and 1945, when the other majors weren’t played.

Schroeder qualifies for a variation on the list, though, and his company is equally strong. Here are the men between 1919 and 1967 who skipped at least one slam, but won the next major that they entered after winning their first major title:

Player           First Major  Next Major  
Jack Crawford    1931 Aus     1932 Aus    
Ellsworth Vines  1931 US      1932 Wimb   
Jack Kramer      1946 US      1947 Wimb   
Ted Schroeder    1942 US      1949 Wimb   
Alex Olmedo      1959 Aus     1959 Wimb

Winning consecutive entries isn’t quite as impressive as the cross-surface feat of, say, Lacoste, who won the French and Wimbledon in 1925, or Rosewall, who won the Australian and the French in 1953. But there isn’t much separating it from the Wimbledon/Forest Hills back-to-backs of Tilden, Budge, Riggs, and Newcombe.

And then there’s the fact that only a one-of-a-kind character could deliver a multi-major career with a seven-year gap in the middle.

* * *

After his 1942 Forest Hills title, Ted Schroeder didn’t return to regular tournament play until 1946. The closest he came to elite competition in the meantime was in 1944, when he found himself at the same Navy base as Joe Hunt, the man who took his place as national champion. The 1942 and 1943 US titlists faced off in front of a large crowd that enjoyed what must have been the highest-quality tennis in Pensacola, Florida for a long time. Hunt won.

By 1946, Schroeder was married and expecting a baby. Still, he committed to the Davis Cup team, which was headed to Australia to reclaim the trophy. He would take unpaid leave for that trip, leaving no flexibility to play that year’s circuit of Eastern tournaments. He worked his way back into form in time to reach the final at the Pacific Southwest in Los Angeles, winning two five-setters before losing to Jack Kramer. Kramer was considered the best amateur in the world, so there was little shame in coming up short.

Schroeder at full stretch

The American side swept the competition in Australia and brought the Davis Cup back home, which made life easier for everyone. To retain the trophy, the defending nation needed to win only one tie, a Challenge Round played late in the season, hosted by the defenders. When the Americans held the Cup, the Challenge Round was usually scheduled immediately before or after the national championships at Forest Hills.

In 1947 and 1948, Schroeder continued to play his part for the home team, winning two singles matches each year against the now-challenging Australians. But he didn’t play Forest Hills. Perhaps business commitments allowed just so much time for tennis and no more, but Kramer offered a different explanation. Schroeder felt he had been burned in the past by the favoritism displayed by the Eastern tennis establishment. That–at least in Kramer’s telling–was reason enough to skip the season’s central individual event.

Whatever the reason behind his scheduling choices, it was clear that tennis was just one of many demands on Ted’s time. According to TennisArchives.com, he entered exactly seven tournaments (not counting Davis Cup) in each of the first three seasons after the war. Two of the 1946 tournaments were part of the Davis Cup trip to Australia. Schroeder played well, but only when time permitted.

* * *

Schroeder took the plunge and returned to grand slam tennis in 1949. A month away from his 28th birthday, he made a whirlwind trip to England, arriving in time to play the Queen’s Club warmup and booking a flight home the Monday after Wimbledon. He planned to be back at his desk on Tuesday.

Ted’s Davis Cup exploits were enough for the Wimbledon seeding committee to rank him first. He lived up to his billing, but bettors who backed him at 7-4 odds lost plenty of sleep during the fortnight. By the end, the Brits were calling him “Lucky Ted.” He overcame a two-set deficit against fellow American Gardnar Mulloy in the opening round, and needed five sets in the quarter-finals, semi-finals, and the final triumph against Jaroslav Drobny. Schroeder escaped two match points in the quarter-final versus Frank Sedgman, even after he was called for a first serve foot-fault on the second of them.

Schroeder himself wasn’t sure how much credit he deserved. He wrote to Harry Hopman afterwards: “I played some bad tennis in this tournament to get myself into trouble and then played some good–and lucky–tennis to get out of it.”

The mix of bad, good, and lucky continued two months later. He came through in five sets against Bill Sidwell in yet another Davis Cup Challenge Round against the Aussies, and he reached the final at Forest Hills (yes, he opted to play) after sneaking past Sedgman and Billy Talbert in two more matches that went the distance. Kramer was so baffled by his friend’s uneven form that after Talbert took a two sets to one lead, he accused Ted of tanking.

21-year-old defending champion Richard “Pancho” González awaited in the final. It promised to be a meeting of huge serves and easy holds, and so it proved. The first set went to 18-16, establishing a record for the longest frame in the tournament’s history. Schroeder didn’t get to deuce on return until the 25th game, and he finally broke in the 34th. After Ted won an easy second set, his form abandoned him, and González’s serve was too strong. After yet another five-setter, Schroeder went home with the runner-up trophy.

* * *

Jack Kramer was rarely afraid to speak his mind, but he didn’t often accuse his friends of tanking. There was a backstory here.

After the 1947 season, Kramer went pro. The professional game depended both on the presence of a big-name star and on a viable challenger who could keep matches interesting. In 1949, even before Wimbledon, Kramer and promoter Bobby Riggs decided that Schroeder was that challenger. They agreed on a contract, but Ted soon decided the pro game wasn’t for him, and he begged off. That left Kramer and Riggs in a tough spot: Schroeder was now the Wimbledon champion, and whoever replaced him would look like a very poor challenger indeed.

Schroeder recognized the problem. Kramer and Riggs thought that Ted agreed not to play Davis Cup and Forest Hills, which would allow Richard González–next in line to turn pro–an opportunity to emerge as a bigger star. While González would be the same player with or without Ted hanging around, professional tennis depended on selling a lot of tickets, so the goal was to get González’s name in as many laudatory headlines as possible before his amateur career concluded.

Agreement or not, Schroeder played. He and Kramer were close, so he must have had mixed feelings. When Kramer accused him of tanking, the rationale was obvious: A loss to Talbert would open the way for González to win the title. It would remove any lingering pressure for Ted to turn pro.

Kramer was similarly skeptical of Ted’s motivation in the final. He later wrote of Schroeder’s approach after taking a two-set lead:

[T]he book called for Schroeder to relax, let Gonzales have the set; then with the intermission [after the third set], come back relaxed and win in four. Instead, Schroeder fought like a tiger for every point but lost 6-1. Ridiculous.

Kramer knew what Schroeder should have done, because the two men had spent their careers playing from the same book. They learned tactics together as teenagers at the Los Angeles Tennis Club. Kramer became famous for his prototypical “Big Game” of high-percentage serve-and-volleying. And Jack thought that the system–devised by a local club player named Cliff Roche–helped Ted even more than it did himself.

* * *

We’ll never know if Schroeder gave his best effort in the 1949 Forest Hills final. Kramer settled on the face-saving conclusion that Ted might have “subconsciously” let his opponent win.

What we do know is that Schroeder very, very rarely lost five-setters. His style was physically demanding; Bobby Riggs called him “the most spectacular, most aggressive player I’ve ever seen.” The Cliff Roche game plan balanced aggressiveness with careful conservation of energy–basically, serve-and-volley combined with strategic tanking.

Before the González match, Schroeder had a career record of 20-2 in deciding fifth sets. Fifth sets are typically contested between closely-matched competitors, so a mark north of 90% defies belief. Novak Djokovic has won 35 out of 45, a rate of 78%. Bjorn Borg won 26 of 32, good for 81%. Schroeder was hardly in the same league as those two, but put him in a decider and he was untouchable. Through the 1949 semi-final at Forest Hills, he hadn’t lost a fifth set since before the war. While he was called “Lucky Ted,” it’s unlikely his record can be fully explained by good fortune.

Kramer explained some of the roundabout wins:

The funny thing was that early in a tournament, Schroeder could not help himself from trying to play a classic game, imitating [Don] Budge. He would try gorgeous textbook strokes, staying back, trading groundstrokes, and then he’d fall behind and have to fight his way back scratching and hustling, playing like Ted Schroeder.

Ted’s greatest matches do give the impression that he could crank things up to eleven, virtually at will. In the 1949 Wimbledon quarter-final against up-and-comer Frank Sedgman, he twice faced match point in the fifth set. The second time, on his serve at 5-6, he was called for a foot-fault on his first serve. He shook it off, charged the net behind his second, and hit a volley winner off the frame.

In the final of that tournament against Drobny, the correspondent for the New York Times essentially signed off on the conservation-of-energy hypothesis. The match went five “none-too-well-played” sets, but Schroeder was “never so extended as the scores would seem to indicate. [He] played only as hard as he needed to win.”

None of this is to say that the five-setters were all tactical. Observers were unanimous that Schroeder’s fighting spirit was unparalleled. Harry Hopman wrote, “It is his outstanding characteristic … to him it is natural to fight.” But he was essentially a part-time player, and he didn’t keep up with any special training regimen while at home. Cliff Roche-style percentage tennis was the only way for him to win five-setters against the best players in the world, and for whatever reason, he abandoned the game plan with so much on the line against González.

* * *

Schroeder’s career spanned nearly two decades, from his first junior tournaments in 1938 to his final local outings in 1956. Yet in that entire time, he played fewer than 100 tournaments. If we count Davis Cup ties, we can nudge the total into triple digits.

What-ifs abound. Had he come along five years sooner, he could’ve played a few more full seasons in his early 20s before the disruption of World War II. Had he tolerated the slights of the tennis establishment, he might have played Forest Hills more often, possibly challenging Kramer in 1946 and 1947 and delaying the rise of Richard González in 1948. If he had more of an appetite for the daily grind of professional tennis, he could have made a lot of money and perhaps even altered the top-heavy landscape of the late-1940s pro game.

But except for the timing of the war, the counterfactuals tend to be variations on the question, What if Ted Schroeder had been less like Ted Schroeder? The type of guy who skips warm-up tournaments and then takes the scenic route to three major singles finals and two titles doesn’t fit the profile of a day-in, day-out pro tennis warrior. The hypothetical version of Ted that entered 20 tournaments every season would’ve quickly soured on the game or sacrificed the qualities that sparked so many dramatic victories.

The career that Schroeder did have was truly one-of-a-kind. Few men have ever eked out so much triumph from so few matches, even if he often needed to play the full five sets to do so.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Darlene Hard [USA]
Born: 6 January 1936
Died: 2 December 2021
Career: 1954-64
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1957)
Peak Elo rating: 2,128 (2nd place, 1963)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 39
 

* * *

It’s safe to say, Darlene Hard would’ve trended on Twitter.

Had the world been better connected in the early 1960s, Hard would’ve received more global acclaim for her three major singles titles, not to mention thirteen women’s doubles and five mixed doubles championships at the grand slam events. Billie Jean King called her “the best doubles player of her generation,” and it’s hard to argue with that.

But that’s not what would’ve gotten Darlene going viral. When Hard died last December, obituaries settled on the word “outspoken” to capture her personality. They focused on a couple of standard-issue clashes: one with tour organizers in Australia, and another with a stodgy Wightman Cup captain. We’re meant to understand that Hard was a bit of a rebel, but not so much that we judge her negatively for it.

It’s true–the Californian was an independent woman in a milieu that didn’t always want young ladies to think for themselves. Hard bristled against unspoken rules that many of her peers were more willing to accept. She knew that she had found her calling, recognized what rewards she could get out of it, and then did everything she could to reach her goals. In time, the controversies faded, and like every other amateur-era star, she eventually starred in fuzzy, nostalgic profiles explaining that it was a different time, and back then, everyone played because they loved the game.

Yeah, that was part of it.

* * *

On the doubles court, Darlene Hard deferred to no man. She paired with a young Australian in the mixed doubles at Wimbledon in 1959, and she began their partnership by announcing, “I’ll serve first and take the overheads.”

She wasn’t joking. Her partner later said, “I’d go out onto the court with her and I’d tell the other team that I wouldn’t have to hit any overheads. Darlene would hit them all. They’d start hitting hard shots at her at the net and she would get them all back. Pretty soon, the word was out. You better hit the ball at [me].”

That’s how Rod Laver won his first grand slam title. The pair won again in 1960, and they added a third at the French in 1961. Laver called her “a great doubles player, maybe one of the best ever at mixed.”

If anything, Hard was even better at women’s doubles. Her 13 major titles came with 8 different partners and spanned a decade and a half, from the 1955 French Championships with Beverly Baker Fleitz to the 1969 US Open with Francoise Durr. She won Wimbledon in 1957 alongside Althea Gibson, and a year later, she paired with Jeanne Arth to defeat Gibson and Maria Bueno in the final at Forest Hills.

Two years later, she won her first major title with Bueno. The pair won three-quarters of the grand slam in 1960 (skipping Australia) and tacked on two more majors in 1962 and 1963. The duo’s sway over women’s tennis was nearly total in 1960. They dominated the doubles, and depending on whose rankings you prefer, may have been the top two singles players as well.

* * *

Hard and Bueno were close off the court, as well. In 1961, Bueno fell prey to a nasty attack of jaundice during her European tour. She was bedridden, and her national federation offered little support. Hard stayed with her through the ordeal, even skipping Wimbledon that year to remain with her friend.

Bueno wasn’t expected to recover fully, but she was back in the Wimbledon semi-finals a year later. From that point until Hard retired from the amateur game in early 1964, the pair were inseparable. They monopolized the trophies on the South African circuit in the winter of 1962-63, played events in Florida and the Caribbean in the spring of ’63, and returned to South Africa in 1963-64. They faced off 24 times on the singles court, and fittingly, they split them 12 apiece.

The pair also worked together to make the best of a complicated financial situation. The early 1960s were the peak of “shamateurism,” when tournaments attracted elite players with under-the-table payments in the guise of expense money. Everyone knew that cash changed hands, and the seaminess of it was one force that led to the push for Open tennis. But the revolution remained several years away. There was no viable women’s professional tour, so young players without family wealth were forced to live off the often fickle largesse of national federations. The only alternative was to play where they could exchange backhands for backhanders.

The first step toward maximizing “expense money” was to make your reputation, and the surest way to do that was to win Wimbledon. Bueno did so, and Hard twice reached the final–in addition to her long list of doubles feats. Beyond establishing one’s on-court prowess, there was room for off-court machinations. Ann Jones, the top British player who played Hard 31 times between 1957 and 1969, gave credit to the duo:

One or two players had themselves better organised in this respect, particularly Maria and Darlene. In fact, wherever I went, they negotiated such high expenses that there was little left for anyone else.

Jones also spent early 1964 in South Africa, losing to Hard six times and Bueno twice. The country’s economy was booming and its tournaments were sponsored by major firms, so one suspects that the three foreign stars were well-compensated for their geographically inconvenient tour. If Jones is to be believed, two of them did much better out of the deal than the third.

* * *

Darlene Hard’s efforts to get the best of her opponents weren’t limited to aggressive volleying and off-court negotations. Julie Heldman called her “one of the great gameswomen of all times.” Ann Jones, who was apparently unconcerned about staying on Darlene’s Christmas card list, concurs:

If a match stood at 1-1 she was always a good sport, calling ‘good shot’ in her opponents favour when the ball landed near the line, but if it reached 5-all and deuce it seemed to me that she would try her best to influence the linesman in her favour. This used to infuriate me.

She certainly had an effect on other players. Heldman was talking about a grand slam mixed doubles final in which Hard twice ran off the court without a word. Later, she explained she needed to change underwear, but Heldman–presumably speaking for many women on the circuit–added, “you never knew what to believe.”

I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t include this photo.

Hard’s most famous on-court reaction inspires wildly differing reactions even now. As the two-time defending champion, she reached the 1962 Forest Hills final, where she faced Margaret Smith (now Court). Darlene had beaten Smith in a tough semi-final the previous year, but she had lost to the 20-year-old Australian five straight times since. The protracted first set finally went to Smith, 9-7, after the Australian saved a set point and Hard’s serve abandoned her. She hit 16 double faults in the match.

Midway through the second set, two line calls went against the American. The second of them secured the sixth game, giving Smith a 4-2 lead. Hard argued, and when that didn’t avail, she broke down in tears. Play stopped for several minutes. Sports Illustrated called it a “weeping spell,” while Rod Laver remembers it as “a tantrum, wailing and stalking around the court.” For her part, Smith described it as “one of the most extraordinary incidents I have ever seen on a tennis court, and if it was prompted by gamesmanship and a wish to unsettle me it certainly had the desired result.”

The crowd got behind Hard, who returned the favor. Darlene bounced back, holding serve and then breaking Smith to love to even the set 4-all. But the reprieve was only temporary. Hard double-faulted again to lose her next service game, and when Smith looked sure to polish off the win, the American barely tried to return the last two serves. In Smith’s retelling:

Darlene stood twenty-five feet away from me at the presentation ceremony which followed on the stadium court. … Darlene’s behavior was inexcusable in a player of her caliber and experience. Or anyone else for that matter.

* * *

In the stories that survive, Darlene Hard comes across as clever, occasionally brilliant, and often petulant. Her 1962 tour of Australia was a failure for all parties, save the tabloids. Hard was recovering from hepatitis, and she felt mistreated throughout, probably for good reason. But one journalist made a plausible claim that the root of the trouble was elsewhere: she “arrived in Australia with a chip on her shoulder because her request for higher expenses had been refused.” One of her more sympathetic hosts concluded that she seemed happiest when she had something to be unhappy about.

Had the American come along a decade later, her place in tennis history would be very different. She retired from the amateur game aged 28, still one of the top three singles players in the world. She had little hope of overtaking Margaret Smith, and she had mentored a young Billie Jean Moffitt (later King), so she knew that the fellow Californian was coming for her as well. Her days at the top would’ve been numbered.

But by the mid-1970s, there was a lot of money in women’s tournament tennis, and financial rewards weren’t limited to just one or two savvy operators. Many women who couldn’t beat either Margaret Court or Billie Jean King still did quite well for themselves. Controversy didn’t hurt, either. It’s appropriate that Heldman’s story about Hard’s purported mid-match “Tampax breaks” took place in the early 1960s, but didn’t see print until Grace Lichtenstein’s book, A Long Way Baby: Behind the Scenes in Women’s Tennis, came out in 1974.

Hard played a few professional events–including the 1969 US Open, where she won her final major doubles title–but quickly fell back into a quiet life as a teaching pro. Her legacy was left to admirers such as King and Laver. I’m sure she told the truth when she said she played because she loved the game. But she pushed the limits of what was acceptable in early 1960s women’s tennis, cracking the door a bit further open so that Billie Jean and her friends could remake the sport into something that would’ve suited Darlene Hard much better.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Bill Johnston [USA]
Born: 2 November 1894
Died: 1 May 1946
Career: 1910-27
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1919)
Peak Elo rank: 1 (1919)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 41
 

* * *

Bill Tilden played well over 1,000 singles matches as an amateur, and only four opponents managed beat him at least three times. The first two are René Lacoste and Henri Cochet, half of the French Davis Cup squad that ended the reign of the United States in 1927 and held on to the trophy for six years. The third was Vinnie Richards, a Tilden protege nearly a decade his junior, who came into his own in the mid-1920s. Richards won 8 of 22 meetings with his one-time mentor.

The fourth is Bill Johnston. Five feet, eight inches tall, he was compact even for his time, and he spent much of his career literally in the shadow of Tilden, who stood five inches taller. Unlike the patrician Easterners who ruled the sport, Johnston came from working-class stock, and he learned his tennis on the public courts of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. He had plenty of time after the 1906 earthquake left schools closed for months.

The contrast–physical and otherwise–between Johnston and Tilden made nicknames irresistible, especially when the two men joined forces on the US Davis Cup squad. Tilden was dubbed Big Bill, and Johnston became Little Bill.

Johnston was 21 months younger than Tilden, but Big Bill was a late bloomer. Johnston didn’t take so long to become a star. He won five titles on the West Coast when he was 17, and he took over the US National title in 1915, a couple of months before his 21st birthday. Tilden took longer to sort out his game. Little Bill won three of their first five meetings before Big Bill turned the tables, and he probably would’ve built up a bigger lead had their paths crossed before 1919.

Johnston’s story is more than just his head-to-head with Tilden, but Little Bill spent most of his career playing second fiddle to the man who defined tennis for generations to come. A closer look at their encounters reminds us that Tilden’s teammate was a legitimate rival, and Big Bill’s eventual dominance was by no means assured.

* * *

1919 East-West Sectional: Tilden d. Johnston, 6-4 0-6 6-4 6-0
1919 US Clay Courts Final: Johnston d. Tilden, 6-0 6-1 4-6 6-2

The first meetings of the two Bills occurred, fittingly, in the Midwest. Tilden, a Philadelphian, was the quintessential Easterner, as were most of the American champions who came before him. Johnston, hailing from San Francisco, represented the new wave from California that would gradually take over US tennis. Neither player had the advantage of home turf, playing sectional matches in Cincinnati and the national clay court event in Chicago.

In July of 1919, Tilden had yet to win a national championship, though he had reached the final the previous year, where he lost to Robert Lindley Murray. Johnston won the US National Championships at Forest Hills in 1915, beating fellow Westerner Maurice McLoughlin. He was runner-up in 1916. He missed the next two seasons while serving in the Navy, and he was still rusty for his first encounter with Tilden.

Little Bill showed what the Cincinnati Enquirer called “elegant form” in the opening two sets of the sectional match, handing Tilden a rare 6-0 defeat in the second, but it was his first tough match in two years, and he couldn’t sustain such a high level. Tilden won in four.

Just one week later, the two met again in the 1919 Clay Courts final. That’s all the time Johnston needed to shake off the rust and regain his top form. Tilden was the defending champion, but he was barely a factor until the third set. Johnston allowed only seven points in the opener, cruised through the second, and built a 4-2 advantage in the third. Tilden came back and forced a fourth set, and according to the Chicago Tribune, the pair delivered a “corker” of a final chapter. Tilden tried a more aggressive attack, but Johnston’s unplayable passing shots delivered him the match.

Tilden learned his lesson. In his 1925 book, Match Play and the Spin of the Ball, he wrote:

Johnston and I play each other from the baseline because we each fear the other’s ground stroke too much to come to the net indiscriminately, but in every point we are sparring for an opening that will allow us to take the offensive and carry it to the net position.

Not many players in 1919 could pin Tilden to the baseline, but Johnston–particularly on the forehand side–was one of them.

* * *

1919 Newport Casino Final: Tilden d. Johnston, 7-5 8-6 6-1
1919 US National Championships Final: Johnston d. Tilden, 6-4 6-4 6-3

The two players met again only a few weeks later, now on grass. While Tilden was not yet the king of the tennis world that he would become, fans at the Newport Casino got a glimpse of what awaited them. A close match was expected, and both men played well.

Johnston fought hard for two sets, winning 38 points to Tilden’s 36 in a losing effort in the opening frame. The second was nearly as close. Johnston won 48 points to Tilden’s 51, and he served for it at 6-5. He conceded a break only when a Tilden shot bounced off the net cord and ricocheted into his face. Little Bill had little left in the tank for a third set, and Tilden steadily broke down his backhand.

Some tennis observers were already thinking of Tilden as, in the words of the New York Times, “the greatest tennis player of the age, if not of all time.” The evidence–including the victory in Newport–was certainly piling up. But Tilden hadn’t even won a national title yet, and before he could so, he would need to overcome the Californian at Forest Hills.

Playing for the 1919 national title, Johnston demonstrated the topspin forehand that was still too much for the would-be greatest player to handle. Little Bill won the match in straight sets, and thanks to that one-of-a-kind weapon, the result was never in doubt. The Times dug deep in its bucket of superlatives:

The forehand drive of William M. Johnston is unquestionably the greatest single tennis shot in the world, bar none. He seems able to use it with every possible degree of speed, with an accuracy that baffles the fastest court covering, and with a steadiness which has discouraged every opponent he has ever faced. No stroke has ever been developed by any other player to equal its efficiency and general dependability.

Even Johnston’s backhand was in top form in the 1919 title match. It was much softer than his forehand, and unlike most of his contemporaries, he added a bit of sidespin to the slice. Typically only a defensive stroke, it was good enough to attack Tilden’s own fragile backhand with the national championship on the line.

After squandering several chances and dropping the first set, “the Philadelphian played as one who could not quite understand what was going on about him,” as the Times put it. Johnston finished the job before his rival could sort things out, but Tilden took away plenty of lessons from the experience:

Up to and including 1919, my backhand had been a shining mark at which anyone could plug away with impunity. Billy Johnston had smeared it to a pulp in the final round of The Championship in 1919. … [H]ad I not done the work necessary to the mastery of that stroke, Johnston would have continued to defeat me just as decisively after 1919 as he did that year.

Johnston’s overpowering forehand and his natural gift for spin weren’t going anywhere. To become the best player in the world, Tilden needed to get better.

* * *

1920 Queen’s Club Final: Johnston d. Tilden, 4-6 6-2 6-4

The Americans failed to reclaim the Davis Cup in 1919, so they headed to Europe in the summer of 1920 to claw their way back to the Challenge Round. The previous year’s Davis Cup winners advanced directly to the final, while challengers needed to win several rounds to earn a crack at the defending champions. Upon arrival in Britain, Johnston and Tilden quickly served notice on their international rivals. Warming up for Wimbledon and the Davis cup matches, they blitzed the field at Queen’s Club in London, setting up a meeting in the final.

Johnston emerged triumphant in a match that the correspondent for the New York Times called “one of the finest tennis matches ever seen in Great Britain.” Little Bill’s forehand once again proved the difference-maker. As if the singles final weren’t enough, the pair came back on court to take the doubles title in only 30 minutes.

The record-setting crowd at Queen’s Club already knew that Johnston and Tilden were due to meet early at Wimbledon. In 1920, draws were not yet seeded, so there was no guarantee that the two strongest Americans–possibly the two best players in the world–wouldn’t meet in the first round. It was almost that bad. The two men were lined up for a third-round clash.

For Johnston, it turned out even worse. His second-round opponent was the Irish veteran James Cecil Parke, an 1908 Olympic medalist in doubles, not to mention an international rugby player. A few weeks short of his 39th birthday, Parke turned in a careful performance, waiting out the uneven Californian, winning 7-5, 2-6, 6-2, 8-6. The Times correspondent was driven to the extremes of his vocabulary: Parke “was almost invariably safe with his drives, of which the American foozled far too many.”

Tilden had no such problem with the Irishman, beating Parke in the third round, 6-3, 6-2, 6-4. Big Bill went on to win five more matches for the title, the first of his ten majors. Johnston got his personal revenge a month later, defeating Parke in five sets in the Davis Cup semi-final. Presumably, Little Bill foozled a lot less often in the rematch.

* * *

1920 US National Championships Final: Tilden d. Johnston, 6-1 1-6 7-5 5-7 6-3
1920 East-West Sectional: Tilden d. Johnston, 6-2 7-5 5-7 6-4

Johnston didn’t have the chance to deliver a third-round victory and stop Tilden’s title run at Wimbledon, but judging from the battle of the Bills at Forest Hills in September of that year, it would’ve been considerably more dramatic than Tilden’s routine defeat of Parke.

If the breathless New York Times match report is to be believed, the match for the 1920 national title took the sport to unforeseen new heights:

The Tilden-Johnston struggle will go down on the records as the most astounding exhibition of tennis, the most nerve-racking battle that the courts have ever seen. It is not often that such a climax of competition lives up to every preliminary expectation. Yesterday, however, the wildest expectations were actually surpassed….

Tilden and Johnston played five acts of incredible melodrama, with a thrill in every scene, with horrible errors leading suddenly to glorious achievements, with skill and courage and good and evil fortune inextricably mingled, and with a constant stimulus to cheers, groans and actual hysteria, so far as the spectators were concerned.

The tribute goes on, if you can believe it. Spectators favoring either player “went through more varieties of emotional reaction than the supposedly dignified and gentle game of lawn tennis could ever have been blamed for in the past.” Describing the match “would require the superlative of all the adjectives that the journalism of the game has either used up or discarded in the past.” (Clearly!) Big Bill’s win was “a triumph of supertennis,” and Johnston was “the gamest man that ever trod on a court.”

As if the action on court weren’t enough, a fatal plane crash during the match was visible from the grandstand. Without film of the contest, and from a vantage point more than a century in the future, it’s tough to know whether it truly was one of the greatest matches of all time. But it was unquestionably among the most memorable.

The key factor separating the two men at this stage in their careers was the serve. Johnston relied more on spin than speed, and failed to record a single ace in five sets. Tilden dealt out 20, and many more of his cannonball serves virtually guaranteed him points, even when the returns came back. Tilden’s new backhand also came in handy, functioning as an offensive weapon both cross-court and down the line.

Johnston was superior in almost every other category. He won three times as many points than Tilden with volleys, and his smash was more effective. He commanded the better lob, and his famous forehand rarely let him down. In the judgment of the Times, “[T]he tennis that he offered yesterday would have annihilated anyone but a Tilden, and a super-Tilden, at that.”

With the Wimbledon and United States titles in his pocket, Tilden was finally the acknowledged champion of the world. Yet Johnston remained only a step or two behind him. The Bills met again in Philadelphia in the East-West competition five days later, and the Californian once again pushed Tilden to the limit. Even the four-set score of 6-2, 7-5, 5-7, 6-4 understated how close it was, as Johnston won more points than his rival in the second set.

* * *

1921 US National Championships 4R: Tilden d Johnston, 4-6 7-5 6-4 6-3

Tennis administrators in the United States failed to learn their lesson from the 1920 Wimbledon draw, when the two American stars nearly met in the third round. The US National Championships remained unseeded, and the titanic finalists of the 1920 tournament were stuck in the same quarter of the 1921 draw.

12,000 fans packed into the grandstand at Germantown, the tournament’s temporary home while a new facility was constructed at Forest Hills. Whether in New York or Philadelphia, fans recognized that a Tilden-Johnston match was the de facto final. Johnston was recovering from tonsillitis and a bout of food poisoning the previous week, but that didn’t stop him from taking the first set. He matched Tilden’s power off the ground and wasn’t fazed by his rival’s big serving.

Tilden won a close second set to even the match, and seized the third when two bad bounces went his way. Johnston’s physical weakness became apparent in the fourth, and his opponent never let up. It was another four-set victory for Big Bill, his fifth win overall in eight career meetings with his chief rival. Yet the world’s greatest tennis player still couldn’t quite distance himself from the pesky Californian.

Two pieces of news kept tennis chatter alive throughout the offseason. After Johnston’s loss in Germantown, his wife told the press that it was his last trip East. He was retiring from Davis Cup and top-level tournaments to devote more time to his business interests. The other news was that the United States Lawn Tennis Association voted to seed its tournaments, protecting the highest-ranked players from each other until the final rounds.

The first story proved to be wrong, an eventuality that made the second tidbit even more important. The Tilden-Johnston rivalry had many more years to run, and they would never again meet without a title on the line.

* * *

1922 East-West Sectional: Johnston d. Tilden, 2-6 6-4 7-5 5-7 6-3
1922 Pacific Coast Championship Final: Johnston d. Tilden, 7-5 7-9 6-1 6-0

Retirement talk forgotten, the rivalry moved for the first time in 1922 to the asphalt courts of California, where Johnston had developed his game. Tilden quickly adjusted to the surface, but not well enough to stay ahead of Little Bill. The morning after the duo’s first encounter out West, the San Francisco Examiner ran with the headline, “Good Little Man Beats Good Big Man.”

In June’s East-West competition, the two men nearly played to a draw. Tilden won 124 points to Johnston’s 123 over five sets. After the particularly hard-fought third set and a rain delay before the fourth, Tilden struggled to regain his focus. The movement of the crowd distracted him, and he was unaccustomed to slippery hard courts.

Still, the world champion came back, forcing a decider. This time, it was Tilden whose body abandoned him. Unusually, he hit several double faults in the final set. Johnston kept making him work, often feinting one way before hitting in the other direction. The Examiner credited the local hero with “great generalship” and speculated about what would result if a man of Tilden’s physique had the skills and wits of a Johnston.

A week later, Johnston repeated the hard-court victory in Berkeley for the Pacific Coast Championship, the biggest title west of the Mississippi. The byline in the Examiner belonged to Tilden, who now supplemented his income as a journalist. In Big Bill’s telling:

Johnston played the best tennis that he has yet displayed, and after two bitterly contested sets, which we divided, outclassed and outmaneuvered me throughout the remainder of the match.

It was a particularly hot day, and Tilden misjudged his ability to recover. He visibly tanked the third set, saving his energy for the fourth. Yet after scoring 13 points in the third, he won only 5 in the fourth. In four years, the two men had played ten matches. The head-to-head stood even at five apiece.

* * *

1922 US National Championships Final: Tilden d. Johnston, 4-6 3-6 6-2 6-3 6-4
1922 East-West Sectional: Johnston d. Tilden, 6-3 4-6 8-6 6-0

The two men delivered yet another epic for the Germantown fans in the match for the 1922 national title. By now, the crowd expected it. The grandstand was filled to capacity an hour before play began, and more spectators jammed the aisles, the roofs, and even the limited breathing space in the press box.

This time, Tilden had a plan. Big Bill realized that, away from the California heat, his physical reserves were superior to Johnston’s. He opted for a conservative game in the early going, accepting the loss of the first two sets in exchange for their dent in Little Bill’s stamina. Tilden made a push for the third, and he confidently expected Johnston to fade.

The Californian nearly won it anyway. He built up a 3-0 lead in the fourth, and gave everything he had left to finish the match quickly. He reached deuce in the fourth game, but Tilden held on, and as the defending champion became more aggressive, Johnston fell apart. By the end of the set, the Times wrote, he was “tottering from exhaustion.” A pair of bad line calls early in the fifth set made the uphill battle even steeper, but it was clear by that point that Tilden would win his third consecutive national title.

For a man who had nearly retired 12 months earlier, it would have been understandable to call it a season after yet another tough loss in a major final. Yet two weeks later, Johnston was back, besting Tilden in a backhand duel as part of the Eastern installment of the season’s East-West competition. Big Bill apparently lost interest and tanked the final set, but the first three frames were as close, and as well-played, as their higher-stakes confrontations.

* * *

1923 Germantown Academy Exhibition: Tilden d. Johnston, 5-7 6-4 6-3
1923 US National Championships Final: Tilden d. Johnston, 6-4 6-1 6-4
1923 East-West Sectional: Tilden d. Johnston, 8-6 7-5
1924 US National Championships Final: Tilden d. Johnston, 6-1 9-7 6-2
1925 Illinois State Championships Final: Tilden d. Johnston, 6-4 6-3 9-7
1925 US National Championships Final: Tilden d. Johnston 4-6 11-9 6-3 4-6 6-3

Johnston got to the end of 1922 with an even record–six wins each–against his longtime rival. But the Germantown final that year was the turning point when Tilden finally figured out how to beat him. They played for the national title three more times, and Johnston was truly competitive only once.

That isn’t to say that Little Bill’s career faded after 1922. Quite the contrary: He made the trip across the Atlantic without Tilden in 1923, and he took the opportunity to make a strong case that he was the second-best player in the world. He won the title at the 1923 World Hard Court Championships* in Paris, beating René Lacoste in the semi-final. He was even better at Wimbledon, winning the championship with a loss of a single set.

* The tournament was played on clay courts. In Europe, “hard courts”–as opposed to “soft” grass courts–were what we now call clay. The French Championships were limited to French players until 1925, so the World Hard event was the most prominent clay court tournament on the tennis calendar.

Back home, though, he couldn’t keep pace with Tilden. The man who won the premier European titles lasted only 57 minutes against Big Bill in the US National Championships. He turned in some stunning performances against the rest of the field, such as a 6-3, 6-3, 6-3 win against Lacoste in the quarter-finals of the 1924 US Championships, followed by a 6-2, 6-0, 6-0 clobbering of Australian star Gerald Patterson. But that run, like so many others, ended at the hands of the Philadelphian.

Little Bill had one last big challenge left in him, and the two men delivered another gripping battle to decide the 1925 national title. Tilden had struggled throughout the season, and questions about his fitness followed him to Forest Hills. But Johnston had faced him at this tournament for seven years running, and he knew better than anyone the heights that Tilden could reach.

The second set ran to 11-9, the longest single frame the two men ever played. Johnston saved a set point at 5-4, and finally earned one of his own against Tilden’s serve at 9-8. Big Bill thrilled the crowd with an ace to save it, and he repelled two more break chances in an 18-point game. Too many of Johnston’s shots began to find the net, and the set–along with any realistic hopes of the match–went to the five-time champion.

By the mid-1920s, the New York Times argued that winning the US title “amounted practically to earning the world’s championship.” In a span of eleven years, from 1915 to 1925, Johnston and Tilden accounted for eight national titles and another eight runner-up finishes. Had Little Bill’s military service not gotten in the way, it’s likely he would’ve added one or two more to his tally in 1917 and 1918. Except for 1921, when he lost to Tilden in the fourth round, he made the final every time his name appeared in the draw.

* * *

Johnston played on the US Davis Cup squad every season from 1920 onwards, winning 14 of 17 singles rubbers and all four of his doubles matches–each one with Tilden at his side. After 1925, the American duo had less reason to focus on each other. The greatest threat to Tilden–and to American dominance in Davis Cup–came from the outstanding generation of French stars now known as the Four Musketeers.

1926 was the first year since 1918 that the US National title was decided without either Bill. Both men lost in the quarter-finals, Johnston to Jean Borotra and Tilden to Henri Cochet. Vinnie Richards kept the American flag flying into the semi-finals with his final-eight defeat of Jacques Brugnon, but Borotra knocked him out in the next round. René Lacoste beat Cochet and Borotra to become the first player from outside the US and Britain to win at Forest Hills.

The outcome of the tournament was particularly bad news for fans who wanted the Davis Cup to remain in the States. Just one week earlier, Tilden and Johnston had held off the Musketeers with ease to hang on to the Davis Cup. Little Bill took care of Lacoste, 6-0, 6-4, 0-6, 6-0, and Tilden brushed aside Borotra, 6-2, 6-3, and 6-3. The doubles also went to the Americans, and after Johnston beat Borotra in straights, the French scored their only victory with Lacoste’s dead rubber four-set win over Tilden.

By the time of the 1927 Davis Cup Challenge Round a year later, the writing was on the wall. The Musketeers, about a decade younger than the American pair, were reaching their peaks. Tilden went to Europe, only to lose to Lacoste in the French Championships final and fall to Cochet at Wimbledon. Johnston played a limited schedule and arrived in Philadelphia without any recent matches against top-level competition.

Little Bill’s rustiness was evident from the get-go. He won only seven games in the opening rubber against Lacoste. Tilden overcame Cochet and the home side’s doubles duo won a five-setter, but the third day’s play finally sent the cup back to Europe. Lacoste–now the best player in the world–vanquished Tilden in four, and Johnston was outgunned by Cochet in another four-setter.

At Forest Hills the following week, Johnston lost in the semi-finals, once again to Lacoste. Finally, at age 32, Little Bill called it a career, and this time the decision stuck. He hadn’t reached the national title match in two years, and now that the Davis Cup resided abroad, fighting to win it back demanded a significant commitment, and there was little practical hope of reclaiming the trophy from the French.

Johnston died two decades later, in 1946. The obituary in his hometown paper referred to the 1920s as a golden age of tennis, and called his forehand “still unequaled.” Even then, he couldn’t quite get out from under his rival’s shadow. The story mentioned Bill Tilden’s name six times.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Adrian Quist [AUS]
Born: 23 January 1913
Died: 17 November 1991
Career: 1930-55
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1939)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 46
 

* * *

On September 1st, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Between September 2nd and 4th, 26-year-old Adrian Quist, newly-enlisted member of the Australian Army’s Sixth Battalion, would play the most important tennis matches of his career.

The Challenge Round of the 1939 International Lawn Tennis Challenge–better known by the name of its trophy, the Davis Cup–would be played by preoccupied American and Australian competitors in front of distracted fans at the Merion Cricket Club in Haverford, Pennsylvania. The year before, Davis Cup summaries made the front page of the New York Times. Now, the first section of the paper was given over to daily updates on the fighting in Europe. Australia would officially be part of the conflict as soon as Britain declared war, so the visiting Davis Cup squad could be called home at any moment.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Davis Cup in amateur-era tennis. Quist called it “an obsession.” The international competition was even more central for Australians than for the other contending nations. Travel between the southern hemisphere and the tennis centers of London, New York, and Paris was so time-consuming that Aussies planned their entire year around Davis Cup commitments. In 1938 and 1939, captain Harry Hopman and his squad committed themselves to Davis Cup prep to the extent that they skipped Wimbledon.

The looming war in Europe raised the stakes even higher. Traveling with the Australian team was federation president Sir Norman Brookes, who had been part of the last Australian team (then representing Australasia) to defeat the United States in a Davis Cup final. That was in 1914, and due to the First World War, the competition didn’t resume again until 1919. Brookes’s teammate on the champion Australasian side, New Zealander Anthony Wilding, died in action in France in 1915.

By 1939, Adrian Quist was recognized as one of the best doubles players in the world. He won the 1935 doubles events at Roland Garros and Wimbledon with Jack Crawford, and he owned four straight titles at the Australian Championships. The last two came with 20-year-old John Bromwich, the other singles player for the Davis Cup tie and his likely partner in the doubles. Quist and Bromwich had just taken the title at the US National Championships in an all-Australian final, topping Crawford and Hopman in straight sets.

Quist was increasingly recognized for his singles prowess as well. In 1936, he ended Crawford’s five-year reign atop Australian tennis, beating the veteran 9-7 in the fifth set of the national championships. Later that year, he upset Bunny Austin in the Davis Cup Challenge Round, one week after nearly defeating Gottfried von Cramm in the Inter-Zonal final of the competition. Quist came within one point of defeating the German 13 times, and saved 12 match points himself before finally capitulating, 11-9 in the fifth set.

American fans were well aware of the Australian’s capabilities on the singles court. In the previous year’s Challenge Round, played at the Germantown Cricket Club in Philadelphia, Quist had pushed Bobby Riggs to four sets. In his second rubber, he had nearly taken the first set from the best player in the world, Don Budge. The baseline umpire called so many foot faults on Quist at key moments in the first set of the Budge match that the Philadelphia crowd rallied behind the visitor, even after Hopman made it clear that he agreed with the umpire’s judgment. In Los Angeles a month later, after Budge had won at Forest Hills to secure his fourth major of the season and the first-ever Grand Slam, Quist knocked him out in the semi-finals at the Pacific Southwest. Presumably the foot-fault judges in California were more forgiving.

By September of 1939, Budge had gone pro. The American side would have to make do with Riggs and a talented, but untested group of Frank Parker, Jack Kramer, and Joe Hunt. The 23-year-old Parker had played Davis Cup in 1937 but lost his starting spot to Riggs in 1938. Kramer and Hunt would be making their international debuts.

For the first time, Quist and his Australian teammates were heavy favorites to take the Davis Cup back to the Antipodes.

* * *

A capacity crowd of Philadelphians jammed the grandstand in Haverford. War or no, it was the biggest tennis event of the year. The presence of Bobby Riggs was a particular enticement, as he was fresh off of a title-winning run at Wimbledon.

Bookmakers set the Australians as 1-to-3 favorites, but the visitors needed to thread a narrow path to victory. Allison Danzig of the New York Times favored Riggs in both of his singles rubbers. The American had beaten Quist the year before, and his 1938 loss to Bromwich came in a dead rubber. Danzig saw the doubles as a near-certainty for the visitors, and figured Frank Parker would struggle to win either singles match. That forecast added up to an Australian victory, but as long as Riggs met expectations, there was little room to maneuver.

The first day of play opened on script. Riggs looked every bit the national champion, sticking with conservative tactics and avoiding Bromwich’s unorthodox two-handed backhand. The American put the first point on the board, 6-4, 6-0, 7-5, in 79 minutes.

Quist had the opportunity to even the tally, but he never got his bearings in the second rubber against Parker. Bromwich had struggled with the slow, wet grass at Merion, and the conditions confounded Quist as well. Both of the visitors preferred faster-playing turf. The Australian veteran was considered steadier than Parker, with strong groundstrokes on both sides and a far superior volley. But the American raised his level, and Quist canceled out every sizzling forehand winner with a pair of errors.

Quist was noticeably out of sorts and uneven throughout the match.* The American targeted his backhand, and Quist’s typically reliable down-the-line shot abandoned him. Parker took the first and third sets, and the visiting player claimed the second and fourth. In the decider, Parker raced out to a 4-0 lead and earned two break points on Quist’s service before the Australian finally unleashed an all-out assault. Danzig wrote that “the madly fought final set … had the crowd in an uproar that bordered on pandemonium.” Quist evened the score at 5-5, but Parker managed one final push to the finish line. The final score was 6-3, 2-6, 6-4, 1-6, 7-5. The narrow path to an Australian victory became almost invisible.

* Jack Kramer claimed in his book, The Game, that some tennis-supporting locals tried to tire out Quist by taking him for a long round of golf the day before he was to play Parker. Oh, those dastardly Philadelphians.

* * *

The Australian pair played so badly in their singles matches that team captain Harry Hopman considered swapping himself in for the doubles rubber. And the starting lineup was the least of the visiting team’s worries. By the time the second day’s play began, they had learned that their country was at war. Australia was the first British Dominion to make the declaration.

Ultimately, Hopman decided to stick with his first-stringers. Sir Norman Brookes expressed his confidence that their focus would remain on the court: “Their duty here is to play tennis. They’ll do it.”

They did it, but it wasn’t easy. Jack Kramer and Joe Hunt were not your typical Davis Cup rookies. The Californians were 18 and 20 years old, respectively, and both would go on to win major titles. Hunt, a cadet at the US Naval Academy, became a pilot and died on a training mission in 1945. Kramer would become the face of professional tennis and a well-known commentator into the 1970s.

Hunt had the biggest serve of any player in the tie, while Kramer relied on a tricky twist delivery. The power of the American duo made it hard for Quist and Bromwich to get to the net, but they usually won when they did. The Aussies regrouped after the first set to keep their side alive in the tie, 5-7, 6-2, 7-5, 6-2.

No team had ever come back from an 0-2 deficit in the history of the Davis Cup Challenge Round. Columnist John Kieran wrote, “If Riggs doesn’t beat Quist a lot of spectators who were here today said they would go home and tear up their racquets.”

* * *

Much had changed in the twelve months since Adrian Quist and Bobby Riggs first met in the 1938 Challenge Round. Quist gained the confidence of a singles win against Don Budge in California, and the Australian team so dominated Stateside doubles competition that they probably needed to buy an extra trunk just to cart all the trophies back home.

But it was Riggs who established himself as a great player. He turned 21 in 1939, a year in which he racked up eight titles, including Wimbledon. Having won his Davis Cup debut a year earlier as the underdog, he returned as a heavy favorite.

Two days of sunshine meant that the grass now played faster, and the tough matches against Parker, Hunt, and Kramer put Quist back in fighting form. After Riggs broke serve to start the match, the Australian reeled off ten games in a row, building a 6-1, 4-0 advantage only to let Riggs creep back in before slamming the door on the second set. Quist’s flat forehand kept the American in a defensive position. Kieran wrote, “The local onlookers began to think that Riggs might be drafted for the Phillies. He was playing their style of game, working hard and losing steadily.”*

* The Philadelphia Phillies baseball team were nearing the end of an abysmal campaign in which they lost 106 of their 152 games. They hadn’t enjoyed a winning season since 1932, and they wouldn’t manage one again until 1949. No wonder the Philly crowds were so enthusiastic about tennis.

Quist was an expert volleyer, but outlasting Riggs required a different set of skills. They played what one onlooker called “long tennis,” pinning each other behind the baseline, often with full-fledged moonballs. Forty years later, Jack Kramer credited Riggs with the best lob he’d ever seen. Kieran wondered if the two players were competing to see who could hit the ball highest.

Riggs leveled the match by taking the third and fourth sets, each by the score of 6-3. Fans both on-site and around the world struggled to stay focused on the tennis. Spectators at Merion snuck off whenever possible, crowding into the clubhouse and out to parked cars to listen to the latest news updates from Europe. British newspapers cast tennis aside entirely: One journalist received a message during the final day’s play: “London doesn’t want any more; not even the result.”

Yet Adrian Quist had saved enough energy for one last push. As Riggs continued to challenge his forehand, Quist passed him repeatedly and charged out to a 5-1 lead in the final set. Riggs narrowed the gap to 5-4, saving a match point in a 16-point ninth game. Quist unleashed a final attack, and when the American’s service return floated long at 40-15, the match went to the Australian, 6-1, 6-4, 3-6, 3-6, 6-4.

Quist avenged his loss from 1938. He made good on the expectation that he would win one of his singles rubbers, and he evened the tie. After seven years as a Davis Cupper for Australia and three bites at the Challenge Round, Quist had done everything he could to send the trophy back home.

* * *

The rest was up to John Bromwich. After more than two hours of dramatic–if not spectacular–tennis from Riggs and Quist, Bromwich quickly showed why no one expected Frank Parker to contribute to the home team’s tally. Allison Danzig called Parker’s forehand “utterly inadequate,” and Bromwich capitalized. Points were long, and some rallies exceeded 50 shots. The match, however, was short.

John Kieran reduced the 76-minute contest to a pithy paragraph: “At the end of the first set the crowd started to leave. At the end of the second set the policemen and ushers left. At the end of the third set the Davis Cup left.”

During the trophy ceremony, Sir Norman Brookes received a cablegram ordering the Australian team home by the first available boat. But before arrangements could be made, it turned out that their presence at home wasn’t so desperately needed. The boys stayed on through the US National Championships the following week. Quist crashed out in the fourth round to a crafty Oregonian named Wayne Sabin, and Bromwich reached the final four, losing to surprise finalist Welby Van Horn. Bobby Riggs won the title with the loss of only two sets in six matches, including a straight-set win over Harry Hopman in the quarters.

Tennis stumbled on a bit longer in Australia, and Quist rode his momentum to a second major singles title, beating Jack Crawford in straight sets for the national championship in January of 1940. With Bromwich, he won the third of what would be eight straight men’s doubles titles at Australia’s premier event.

But the record-setting doubles streak would have to wait. For the duration of the war, major tournaments were canceled, and tennis in Australia was mostly limited to fund-raising exhibitions.

* * *

World War II took a big bite out of Adrian Quist’s peak. He won the Australian Championships for the third time in 1948 and added a passel of other titles at home. But he was never again a factor on the international scene. He stood aside for Bromwich and Dinny Pails on the Davis Cup squad in 1946 and 1947, and then returned to action in 1948 only to lose badly to Frank Parker and Ted Schroeder in the Challenge Round singles rubbers.

Due to the war, the Australians didn’t have the chance to defend their 1939 Davis Cup victory until 1946. The United States side, led by Schroeder and Jack Kramer, quickly seized it back, and they held on for three years after that. Australia was the runner-up each time, but in those first four post-war meetings, they managed only two match wins–both of them doubles rubbers–against 18 losses.

A new generation, led by Frank Sedgman, would win back the Cup for Australia in 1950, and they would hold on for 13 of 16 years after that. By then, Quist was out of the picture, though he was still a strong enough doubles player to win both the Australian Championships and Wimbledon with Bromwich in 1950.

Quist took on a larger role with Dunlop Sports, his longtime employer. His job put him in a position to mentor some of the best up-and-coming Australian players, including four-time major winner Lew Hoad. Even when the Davis Cup was in foreign hands, Australia swung far above its weight in world tennis thanks to the ongoing contributions of lifers like Quist.

Compared to others of his generation, like the traditionalist Harry Hopman, Quist understood the need for pro tennis. His one complaint was that the pros were insufficiently committed to the Davis Cup. In 1981, he wrote to The Sydney Morning Herald, criticizing the new era’s stars: “I know of players of earlier years who would have sacrificed a couple of their fingers to have played for their country.”

Adrian Quist kept all of his fingers, but I have to believe he was talking about himself.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Kei Nishikori [JPN]
Born: 29 December 1989
Career: 2007-present (15+ seasons)
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak ATP rank: 4 (2 March 2015)
Peak Elo rating: 2,210 (3rd place, 2016)
Major singles titles: 0 (2014 US Open finalist)
Total ATP singles titles: 12

* * *

No majors, no Masters titles, no semi-finals at three of the four slams, and a mere nine weeks in the top four the ATP rankings. What on earth is Kei Nishikori doing on this list?

Nishikori’s entire career has overlapped with the reign of the Big Four. He never made much progress against them in head-to-heads, going 2-18 against Novak Djokovic, 2-12 versus Rafael Nadal, 2-9 against Andy Murray, and 3-8 facing Roger Federer. My Elo ratings and the official ATP rankings agree that Kei only broke the quartet’s stranglehold on the top four spots when Roger or Rafa was injured, except for a brief spell when Elo had him in a dead heat with Murray.

You could be an extremely good player in the mid-2010s and never sniff the #3 ranking. You could be a very good player for an entire decade and never win a big title. The generations of men born between about 1985 and 1995 weren’t bad, they just had unfortunate timing. So Kei and a handful of other all-time greats are stuck with distinctly mediocre-looking records.

For four or five years in the middle of the last decade, Nishikori was the fifth best player on tour. He didn’t have the capacity to redline his game for the two weeks of a major, like Stan Wawrinka did. He didn’t have the raw power to blast the top guys off the court, as did Juan Martin del Potro. But his quickness, court sense, and shotmaking abilities made him a factor every time he showed up healthy for a tournament.

* * *

Nishikori never cracked the top three on the ATP computer, but his climb up the rankings had more than its share of drama. His nation was watching, and when he cracked the top 45, he set the first of many new records for Japanese men. Kei’s path-breaking progress made him enormously popular at home, even if he never dislodged the Big Four.

Beyond his status as a Japanese hero, what sets Nishikori apart–even though it hasn’t translated into many titles–is his uncanny ability to win deciding sets.

I first wrote about Kei’s deciding-set domination in April of 2015. At the time, he had won 27 of his last 30 deciding sets, a nearly unbeatable run that stretched over more than a year. It wasn’t even that unusual for him. He had reeled off 17 consecutive deciding sets in 2011-12, part of another 27-for-30 streak. No one else had ever won more than 27 in 30, and only nine other players–including Djokovic, Federer, Nadal, and Michael Chang–had achieved the same feat.

His career record in deciding sets, as of April 29, 2015, was 75-20, a 79% winning percentage. No one else in the Open Era came close. Bjorn Borg was second, at 75%, followed by Djokovic. Novak’s mark at the time was 74%, and has since dropped to 73%. No other played topped 70%.

Injuries and regression to the mean have brought Nishikori back to earth a bit, but almost seven years later, his record in deciding sets still stands at 72% (149-57), behind only Borg and Djokovic. Sure, some of the 200-plus deciders were against middling players he should’ve beaten in straights. (Even Borg and Djokovic have a few of those.) But that doesn’t fully account for his historically great record. He is 42-28 in deciding sets against the top 20 (42-23 through 2018), 25-17 versus the top ten (25-13 through 2020), and 13-11 against the top five.

Nishikori isn’t one of the top 100 players of all time. But if greatness were measured by the amount a player improved heading into the third or fifth set, he’d be top ten.

* * *

There’s no doubt that Kei gets better in one-set shootouts. There are 120 players who have won at least 50 best-of-three matches in deciding sets since 2000. Of that group, Nishikori holds the second-best record in third sets. Only Djokovic is better.

Another way to measure a player’s improvement in the final set is to compare their deciding-set win rate with their overall percentage of sets won. Good players win the majority of their matches, most of them in straights, so the opponents who push them to third sets are, almost by definition, better than average. As a consequence, most players win a lower rate of deciding sets than overall sets. Stan Wawrinka is a good example. In best-of-threes, he has taken 63% of total sets. He wins only 58% of third sets. More than three-quarters of 21st-century players fit the same mold, losing more deciding sets than total sets.

Not Nishikori. His third-set win percentage is not only better than his win rate in first and second sets, it exceeds his own rate of winning earlier sets by a wider margin than anyone else’s. He has won 65% of total sets and 71% of deciders. The resulting difference of six percentage points is better than that of any other player in the era, and it’s not even close. Only one other active player–David Goffin–has managed even a three-percentage-point difference.

One part of the explanation is that Kei is as streaky as anyone on tour. That isn’t the whole story, because the mere fact that a player is streaky doesn’t mean he’s going to have good streaks at the right moments, as Nishikori so often has. Still, very few players endure three-set roller-coasters quite like he does.

When Nishikori goes the distance in a best-of-three, the first two sets tend to be lopsided. On average, he wins 3.5 games in the sets he loses, and he gives away 3.5 games in the first set he wins. Those numbers may not sound noteworthy, but with the small margins that prove decisive in men’s tennis, they are considerably more extreme than average. Compared to the 120 players with extensive deciding-set records in this century, only 13 players win fewer games in the sets they drop. (You won’t be surprised to learn that Fabio Fognini leads this category, with 3.1.) Only 17 players lose fewer games in the first sets they win. (Another non-surprise: Djokovic tops this list, with 3.2.)

A ranking of 13th or 17th among 120 players is hardly jaw-dropping stuff. But only three players are more extreme in both categories than Nishikori, and two of them are clay-courters, Alberto Martin and Guillermo Coria. The third is Stefan Koubek. No active ATPer plays more lopsided 1st and 2nd sets in the matches that end up going three.

* * *

The players among Kei’s contemporaries who win a lot of deciding sets do so because they are flat-out good at tennis. Djokovic is slightly better than Nishikori in best-of-threes that go the distance, but there’s no magic to it. He wins 78% of all sets, while Kei manages only 65%. Novak is worse in deciders than other sets (again, because of the higher level of competition), while Kei somehow gets better.

Nishikori’s deciding-set record, jaw-dropping as it is, manages to understate just how much he improves when the deciding set arrives. The transition from 2nd to 3rd set (or 4th to 5th) somehow converts him from a mediocre player that couldn’t get the job done in straights to a stronger server, a better returner, and an absolute beast when faced with break point.

I looked at point-by-point data for 108 of Kei’s deciding-set matches to get a sense of how he changes. It’s a sizable and more or less random sample of his deciders between 2011 to 2018. You can find most of the raw data in one of my GitHub repos.

Nishikori won 63.0% of service points in the first and second sets (or first four sets, in best-of-fives) of these matches. That’s considerably worse than his 64.4% average from 2011 to 2018. His opponents in these matches were better than the ones he dismissed in straight sets, which may explain the entire difference. In the deciding sets of these matches, his winning percentage on serve increased to 66.4%. A jump of three percentage points is huge–it takes him from a below-average server to an above-average one. In 2021 terms, he improved from the equivalent of Marton Fucsovics to the equal of Denis Shapovalov.

Kei upped his game on the other side of the ball in final sets, as well. Before the decider, he won 37.8% of return points. In the final set: 40.7%. The first number is roughly tour average, while anything above 40% is elite. With the match on the line, he started treating above-average-serving opponents like weak ones.

If Nishikori had figured out how to win two-thirds of his serve points and 41% of his return points any time he faced a strong player, we’d have spent the last decade talking about a Big Five. (And not the one with Wawrinka in it.) Those two numbers are close to Andy Murray’s level over his entire career. Such a dramatic improvement in deciding sets explains why Kei dominated when the finish line was in sight.

But it still isn’t the whole story. When a match comes down to a single set, one run of bad luck can turn into a break of serve, and one break can determine the outcome. Nishikori became remarkably good at preventing that from happening.

In the first two (or four) sets of these matches, Kei saved only 59% break points against him. That’s well below his career average, and it’s not very good by any standard. Only a handful of players in today’s ATP top 50 save fewer break points. But in deciders, Nishikori shut down 68% of break points. Like his deciding-set return game, that’s elite stuff. Novak Djokovic won three majors in 2021 while saving only 67% of break points. A nine-percentage-point swing in a stat like this means that Kei’s opponents suddenly found themselves up against an entirely different player.

* * *

Nishikori’s story has always been full of what-ifs. What if his career didn’t overlap with the Big Four era? What if he had stayed healthy? (His Wikipedia page uses some variation of the word “injury” 30 times, and in the few weeks since I wrote the first draft of this essay, he went under the knife again.) What if Marin Cilic hadn’t brought his best game to the 2014 US Open final?

We can add another mouth-watering hypothetical to the list. What if Nishikori had been able to sustain his level of deciding-set focus and execution for entire matches? We got glimpses of that potential when he upset Djokovic to reach the 2014 US Open final and when he battled Nadal for nearly three hours in the 2016 Olympics bronze medal match.

Maybe there are still reasons to be optimistic. Kei is still only 32 years old, younger than Djokovic and Nadal and considerably more experienced than the rest of the top ten. He beat Andrey Rublev at the Olympics last summer, and he took sets from Rafa, Alexander Zverev, and Stefanos Tsitsipas in the last 12 months. He’ll miss most of the 2022 season recovering from hip surgery, so the rosy view is that he’ll come back rested and even stronger.

At least some of the old magic is still there: He won 14 deciding sets last year in only 22 tries. You never know–maybe Nishikori has another year-end #5 in him.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Angela Mortimer [GBR]
Born: 21 April 1932
Career: 1949-62
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1961)
Peak Elo rating: 2,105 (1st place, 1959)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 108
 

* * *

130 pages into her 1962 autobiography, My Waiting Game, Angela Mortimer delivers what could have been the book’s subtitle: “Stolidly I persevered.” It doesn’t quite have the ring of the Elizabeth Warren-inspired feminist rallying cry, and Mortimer was describing only a single comeback at a middling tournament. Yet the phrase neatly represents her entire career.

Mortimer didn’t start playing tennis seriously until her mid-teens. In 1954, she was beginning to establish a reputation as one of the leading players in Britain, only to battle sinus troubles that left her unable to compete at all. The treatment led to the discovery that she was steadily growing deaf, and that she could completely lose her hearing at any time. On a 1955 tour of the Middle East, she contracted amoebic dysentery that would recur, undiagnosed, for two years. The eventual cure left her so weak that in her first tournament back, she retired from a match one game away from victory, unaware of the score and barely able to see.

As she rose through the ranks, the British press saw her potential as that of a second-tier player at best. It’s barely necessary to add that the commentariat counted her out each time her health betrayed her and she struggled to regain her fitness.

Her peers knew better. They learned something early on that fans and reporters took a decade to discover. Her husband, Davis Cup veteran and long-time tennis writer John Barrett, said she was “bloody-minded and refused to give up.” Mortimer could hardly take offense at his choice of phrase. In 2011, she expressed her relief that she won Wimbledon in her second crack at the title match: “[I]f I’d lost again, I’d have gone on trying and trying until I was about 86 because I was so bloody-minded.”

The words changed depending on who was at the typewriter–“gritty,” “tenacious,” “steady,” “tactical,” “stubborn”–but the story did not. An unassuming girl from Devon without any apparent physical gifts transformed herself into the best player in Britain and the 1961 Wimbledon champion. Stolidly, she persevered.

* * *

Angela Mortimer remains remarkably unheralded for a British Wimbledon champion. She was the first women’s singles titlist from the host country since 1937–Americans had won every edition from 1938 to 1958–and only the third since World War I. Ann Jones and Virginia Wade are the only Brits to have matched the feat since.

She’s lost out on some acclaim because she never embraced the press. Her hearing troubles made crowded gatherings unpleasant. Combine the chatter of press scrums with reporters’ constant skepticism about her ability, and you can understand why she would, as she put it, “avoid them like mad.” The stringer assigned to profile her after the Wimbledon victory barely knew what to write about. Mort was “shy and lonely” and “quiet-spoken and retiring” in back-to-back sentences.

Another factor is the field at the 1961 tournament that she won. The late 1950s and early 1960s were a period of transition in women’s tennis. After Doris Hart and Louise Brough retired, Althea Gibson picked up the slack for a couple of years, then quit to pursue more lucrative opportunities. Maria Bueno took over the top spot in 1959, but she was sidelined by an attack of jaundice in early 1961 that knocked her off the circuit for a year. Future champions Margaret Smith (later Court) and Billie Jean Moffitt (later King) made their Wimbledon debuts in 1961, but neither advanced past the quarter-finals.

Mortimer’s path to a signature title, then, was wide-open. She lost only two games in her first three matches, and finished her fortnight with wins over Vera Sukova, top seed Sandra Reynolds, and fellow Brit Christine Truman. Only Truman had won a major, and none of them would go on to win another.

In the final, Truman won the first set and had four break points for 5-3 in the second. Instead of converting and serving for the match, she slipped and fell on a cramping leg. She was both rattled and slightly hobbled, and by the time she recovered, Mort had taken the second set and grabbed an early break in the third. Truman put herself back together and evened the decider, but Mortimer broke for 6-5 and delivered one of her most confident service games of the match to win it, 7-5.

As the new champion put it, Chris got the sympathy, and Angela got the title. Wimbledon championships don’t come with asterisks, but the combination of the weak field, the timely injury, and Mortimer’s standoffishness kept the resulting level of patriotic fervor manageable, both at the time and in the six decades since.

* * *

It’s true: Angela Mortimer’s run to the 1961 Wimbledon title is not one of the more impressive in the tournament’s history. 18-year-old Margaret Smith was the best player in the field, and it was Christine Truman who ousted her in the quarters.

But it’s a mistake to judge any player by one tournament, even if it’s the one she’s best known for. Mortimer won 108 titles in a 12-year span, adding at least five new trophies to her collection every season, even when sinus troubles kept her off the court and dysentery laid her low. She could handle a physically uncompromised Truman just fine: Mortimer won 10 of their 13 meetings.

Mortimer (left) and Anne Shilcock
won the 1955 Wimbledon doubles title.

Mort dominated everywhere except for the United States, and she was particularly deadly at home. One ten-month stretch from August of 1958 to June of 1959 almost defies belief. Two months removed from her first run to the Wimbledon final, where she fought Althea Gibson to a 8-6 opening set, she headed for the continent. After losing in the semifinals in Munich, she won four tournaments in a row, then came home and won a hometown event in Torquay, capped with a final round win over Ann Haydon (later Jones).

That four-tournament, 17-match winning streak was just the start. She began 1959 at the Scandinavian Indoors (where, against Truman in the final, she dropped the first set, then stolidly persevered) and then played two events in France before coming home. She lost only one set on the whole trip. She secured ten more titles before Maria Bueno finally stopped her in a three-set semi-final at Birmingham. All told, the 1958-59 streak totaled at least 62 straight match wins* and 14 titles. Oh, and for good measure, she bounced back to beat Bueno the next time they met, on the American swing in August.

* Some of these events had relatively small draws, and Mortimer often received byes. Still, existing records may not be complete, especially for tournaments outside of Britain.

Mortimer was just as good in the first half of 1961. She went 42-2 in 10 tournaments, beating everyone except for the West German #1, Edda Buding. Both losses came as a prolonged bout with tennis elbow weakened her game and nearly kept her from entering Wimbledon at all. She had beaten Buding in six previous meetings.

* * *

Descriptions of Angela Mortimer’s game–even apart from the less-complimentary connotations of “stubborn” and all its synonyms–imply that she had no business beating top players. When she lost early at the 1955 US National Championships to Darlene Hard, a reporter wrote that her serve “invited and received punishment.” She was reluctant to come to net, “plugging steadily away” at the baseline.

Yet the British star held her own against every major player of her generation, and she often got the better of matchups with more outwardly talented players. I’ve mentioned her 10-3 record against Truman, and she won 19 of 29 against Ann Haydon. Her most frequent opponents were fellow Brits, and few of them stood a chance against her. From 1952 until her retirement a decade later, her record against countrywomen amounted to at least 297 wins against 21 losses–almost half of those against Haydon.

Amid the backhanded compliments, glimpses of Mortimer’s game creep in. She “covered court splendidly” in a Wightman Cup win, and in 1960, Allison Danzig gave her credit for a “flow of heady tennis.” She owed the 1961 Wimbledon title to an “impeccable ground game” that she planned “thoughtfully.” Lance Tingay praised her unusual “tactical skill.” Fireworks weren’t necessary.

Nearly everyone she faced, she figured out how to beat. She played multiple matches against 127 different opponents, and she turned in at least one victory against 120 of them. The exceptions are limited to all-time greats (Maureen Connolly, Louise Brough) and Brits she met early in her career (Jean Walker Smith). She upset Bueno, Darlene Hard, Shirley Fry, and Margaret Osborne duPont, and scored a point for team Britain with a 1955 Wightman Cup win over Doris Hart.

At Wimbledon in 1959

Most impressive is her oft-forgotten record against 1957 and 1958 Wimbledon champion Althea Gibson. A Wikipedia-level overview of Mortimer’s career points out that Gibson beat her twice in major finals: at the French Championships in 1956, and at Wimbledon two years later. Both times, the American won one easy set and needed to dig deep for the other. Althea needed 22 games before she finally put away the second set of the title match at Roland Garros, 12-10.

What the executive summary doesn’t tell you is that Mortimer and Gibson met six times, not just two. Their travels coincided in the winter of 1955-56, and they lined up for four more clashes, three of them in finals. In Mexico City, Stockholm, and twice in Egypt, Mort won them all, all but one in straight sets.

Yes, Mortimer would’ve traded all four wins for one more major. And sure, Gibson wasn’t yet at her peak. But 1955 Althea was already fearsome. She lost only three matches to other opponents that season, and took a set from Wimbledon champion Brough in one of them. In his 2005 book The Match, about Gibson and Angela Buxton, Bruce Schoenfeld explains:

Mortimer was stubborn enough to disregard the aggressiveness in Althea’s manner that intimidated so many other players. ‘It gave me more reason to want to show her that I could beat her,’ Mortimer says.

* * *

1961 had been Angela Mortimer’s 12th shot at Wimbledon, and with the trophy secured, she was finally ready to move on. She played through the 1962 season with a typically dominant British spring. She won five of the seven tournaments she entered, losing only to South African star Renee Schuurman, who beat her twice.

Somehow, the Wimbledon seeding committee reviewed the defending champion’s record and placed her 6th, behind Margaret Smith, 1961 absentees Darlene Hard and Maria Bueno, Schuurman, and even fellow Brit Ann Haydon. This time, he wasn’t stubborn enough to make the committee look bad, falling in the fourth round to an in-form Vera Sukova, who reached the final.

Mortimer retired at the end of the season, leaving little doubt that there was more Wimbledon-worthy tennis in her racket bag. She tacked on five more titles to her career haul between August and November, getting some last-minute revenge on Schuurman and beating Haydon a whopping five more times.

In her book, she recalled her mindset the night before the 1961 Wimbledon final. She knew she had worked as hard as anyone: “Every stroke I ever mastered had been the result of hours of slogging against the brick wall.” Most opponents didn’t have a chance against her, and even the greats had their work cut out for them. In the end, she became the brick wall.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Ashley Cooper [AUS]
Born: 15 September 1936
Died: 22 May 2020
Career: 1952-63
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1957, 1958)
Peak Elo rating: 2,164 (1st, 1958)
Major singles titles: 4
Total singles titles: 31
 

* * *

Ashley Cooper must be the only player in tennis history to take over the #1 spot in the world rankings after losing a lopsided major final to the previous #1.

Cooper was the clear number two headed into the 1957 Championships at Wimbledon. The 20-year-old from Melbourne had taken a giant step forward by winning the Australian national title that year. But Wimbledon defending champion Lew Hoad was clearly head-and-shoulders above the field, and he was rounding back into form after back problems hampered him earlier in the season. Aside from Aussie tennis honcho Sir Norman Brookes, a Cooper partisan, everyone favored Hoad. Both men raced to the final, losing only one set apiece in the first six rounds.

Hoad played one of the best matches of his life for the title. One out of three points ended in a Hoad winner, and Cooper managed only five games. It was over in 57 minutes. Even Sir Norman had to admit that Lew was king.

Within a week, the newly-minted champion signed on with Jack Kramer to play in the professional ranks. He agreed to a two-year deal worth $125,000, leaving the amateur game behind.

Hoad’s defection left amateur tennis without its top dog. In the days before ATP computer rankings, tournaments relied on the annual rankings published by veteran sportswriters such as Lance Tingay of The Daily Telegraph. Ashley Cooper, the inexperienced Wimbledon runner-up who occupied second place on the previous list, became the default #1 and would take his place at the top of the draw two months later at the US National Championships.

* * *

It’s easy to forget about Ashley Cooper amid the onslaught of Australian talent in the 1950s and 1960s. From 1952 to 1973, the span that Rod Laver dubs the Golden Era of Australian tennis, Aussies won 58 of 88 major men’s singles championships. 40 of the finals were decided between Australians. 62 of the men’s doubles titles went to the same nation, and the lads from down under held the Davis Cup for all but three years between 1950 and 1967.

If there was a platinum generation at the height of the Golden Era, Cooper was smack in the middle of it. Born in 1936, he was two years younger than Hoad and Ken Rosewall. He was two months older than Roy Emerson, and two years older than Laver and Fred Stolle. Had Hoad and Rosewall hung on a bit longer in the amateur ranks, Cooper may never have even earned a spot on the Davis Cup squad.

The lure of pro tennis paychecks in the 1950s ensured that no one dominated the majors for long. Tony Trabert won three-quarters of the grand slam in 1955, then went professional. Rosewall switched allegiances after taking the 1956 title at Forest Hills. Hoad accepted a record-setting bonus after crushing Cooper at Wimbledon in 1957. Those men–plus Richard “Pancho” González, Frank Sedgman, and Pancho Segura, among others–were playing elite-level tennis in 1958, just not at the grand slam events. They barnstormed around the world and contested separate pro tournaments. The amateur circuit–including the majors–was left to a mix of promising youngsters and veterans committed to the amateur game.

The fluctuations at the top of the rankings were perfectly suited to the tennis factory that was Oz. When Cooper and his peers learned the game, Australia didn’t face the same post-World War II austerity that hampered Europe. Aussies didn’t view tennis as an upper-class pursuit, like many Americans did. The country was tennis-mad, and Harry Hopman–together with a large cast of coaches, former players, and regional talent scouts–groomed the best youngsters for international glory.

The deep pool of Australian talent was never more evident than in 1957. Seven different men reached a grand slam semi-final that year, five of them Aussies. In the first major without Hoad, at Forest Hills, Cooper reached the final without the loss of a set. The championship match pitted him against unseeded Queenslander Mal Anderson. Cooper had won all six prior meetings with Anderson, including the 1957 Australian Open semi-final, but the underdog was too strong, winning 10-8, 7-5, 6-4. Both men impressed the crowd: No less an authority than Don Budge was driven to exclaim, “Wow, these guys can play!”

Cooper remained #1 at the end of the year, with one title, two finals, and a semi-final showing at the majors. He would dispel any lingering doubts–and play his way into the Hall of Fame–in 1958.

* * *

Ashley Cooper didn’t quite fit the mold of the Golden Era star from down under. Like most of his peers, he came from a middle-class background. But both of his parents were teachers, and they valued education. Harry Hopman encouraged his charges to leave school in their mid-teens–many Australian boys did so anyway–and take low-level jobs with sporting goods firms. The positions were essentially sponsorships that allowed budding talents to travel the country playing exhibitions, and they offered ample time off to compete at tournaments.

Cooper not only finished high school, he earned a scholarship to a teaching college. His father didn’t want tennis to derail his education, so he gave Ashley a year or two–maximum–to see what he could accomplish in the sport.

Cooper before his first match at Wimbledon in 1958

Cooper now had a deadline, and he trained like it. Hopman was known for his demanding practice regimen, putting his athletes through hefty doses of running and two-on-one drills that left foreign players in awe. Cooper was the one player who felt the need to do even more.

Teammates called him “six-pack”–a moniker that would’ve fit the drinking habits of most Australian players, but referred instead to Cooper’s physique. The New York Times called him a “fanatic for physical condition,” noting that his first stop after winning Wimbledon and crossing the Atlantic in 1958 was the New York Athletic Club. On exhibition tours, he would ask the driver to stop 10 kilometers from his destination. He’d run the rest of the way.

As Cooper said, “When a Hopman player walked onto the court, he would be fit and strong and able to outlast anyone he played.” Ashley could outlast even another Hopmanite. He won 28 of his 37 career five-setters as an amateur, 10 of the marathon victories coming against fellow Aussies. He played 11 five-setters in his banner year of 1958, and he won 10 of them.

* * *

Ashley Cooper was nearly unstoppable in 1958. A right-handed serve-and-volleyer, he was steady if not spectacular, with no world-class shots but no glaring weaknesses. His even temper complemented his unparalleled fitness. He began his career year by winning every match he played down under, defeating Mal Anderson in straight sets to defend his Australian national title. His first stop abroad was Roland Garros, where he reached the semi-finals for the third year running, losing a heartbreaker to Luis Ayala after winning the first two sets. It was his only five-set loss of the season, and it would come back to haunt him.

At the time, though, the early exit at the French was little more than a stumble. Cooper made a smooth transition to grass, winning his first seven sets at the North of England Championships before battling his countryman, Roland Garros champ Mervyn Rose, to a 4-6, 7-5, 10-12, 6-1, 14-12 victory in the final. He withdrew after one round at Queen’s Club, and taking the extra rest would prove wise.

All of Cooper’s extra time in the gym paid off at Wimbledon. In seven matches, he played 28 sets, spanning 322 games. It’s an all-time record for a champion, and one that is unlikely to be broken in the tiebreak era. Abe Segal made him work to the tune of 13-11, 6-3, 3-6, 14-12 in the fourth round, Bobby Wilson put him through another five sets in the quarters, and Mervyn Rose won a 9-7 first set in the semi-finals. Another outstanding Australian, Neale Fraser, didn’t look like much of a threat in the final, but ultimately pushed Cooper to 11-11 in the fourth set before the iron man claimed his title, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4, 13-11.

The US Nationals were easier going, but a second straight major was far from a sure thing. Back pain contributed to an early loss for Cooper at the Eastern Grass Court Championships, and Mal Anderson beat him in the final at Newport. At Forest Hills, none of that turned out to matter. Cooper reached the title match with the loss of only a single set, waltzing past Ayala in the second round and Fraser in the semis.

Anderson nearly defended his 1957 title, serving for the match at 5-4 in the fourth set. Cooper summoned his best backhand returns, rifling Mal’s “whiplash” serves back at Anderson’s feet to break to love. Cooper won the set, but 18 games later, the match once again appeared to be Mal’s. At 6-5 in the decider, Cooper lost his footing, and for several minutes he was unable to stand, clutching his ankle in pain. After receiving treatment, he somehow recovered and took the match, 6-2, 3-6, 4-6, 10-8, 8-6.

There was no question that Cooper would once again stand as the #1 amateur in the world rankings. 60 years later, he would rue the loss in Paris as “the one that got away.” Missing out on the French title–and the calendar-year grand slam–certainly deprived him of a more prominent place in the history books. But he had little else to regret. Cooper won three of the four majors, plus another 11 titles, for a cumulative record of 81 wins against 7 losses. The only unknown was whether this new, improved Ashley Cooper was the equal of Lew Hoad and his fellow professionals.

* * *

For all of its triumphs, Cooper’s 1958 season ended in disappointment. Australia held the Davis Cup after winning the international competition for two years running, and they hosted the United States in the year-end Challenge Round to determine whether the trophy would extend its stay in Oz. Cooper and Anderson were picked to play the singles. The star of the tie, however, turned out to be the 22-year-old Peruvian-American Alex Olmedo, who beat both Aussies in singles. Olmedo completed his rampage by partnering Ham Richardson to defeat Anderson and Fraser in a doubles rubber for the ages, 10-12, 3-6, 16-14, 6-3, 7-5.

Cooper can hardly be blamed for losing to Olmedo, who would win the Australian Championships the following month and Wimbledon–over a young Rod Laver–later in 1959. But there were plenty of excuses. Cooper had just married Helen Wood, Miss Australia, an event that put him squarely in the public eye. Australia loved their tennis stars, but Helen was the real celebrity, and Cooper joked that for years after, he would be “Mr. Wood.”

Just as much on Cooper’s mind was his intent to go pro. Like Rosewall and Hoad before him, Ashley couldn’t resist a real paycheck after years of traveling cheap as a federation-sponsored tennis bum. He was so distraught at the loss of the Davis Cup that he considered canceling the pro contract to help win back the trophy in 1959. But ultimately, he wanted to test himself against players like Hoad and González.

He was right to wonder where he stood. Years later in his autobiography, pro tennis promoter Jack Kramer asked, “Who would you rather see play? Cooper versus Anderson for the championship of Australia, or Hoad versus [González] for the championship of the world?” If González was the prototypical professional champion without much of an amateur record, Ashley Cooper was the opposite. The man who dominated amateur tennis for 18 months had lasted less than an hour against Hoad in Lew’s last match at Wimbledon.

After 7 matches, 28 sets, and 322 games,
at Wimbledon in 1958

The pundits proved correct. Cooper was out of his depth as a pro. In 1959, he scored wins over González, Hoad, and Tony Trabert, but these were few and far between. On a North American tour that year with González, Hoad, and Mal Anderson, he placed third. He won about one-third of the time, often playing the undercard match against Anderson.

He wasn’t the first player to have a hard time transitioning to the professional lifestyle, which often felt more like a traveling circus than the laid-back, clubby atmosphere of amateur tennis. Cooper never fully established whether he could’ve become a contender on the pro tour. An arm injury in 1962 left him immobilized for months, and at age 27, his career was over.

* * *

The Australian dynasty, of course, continued. Olmedo and Nicola Pietrangeli managed to sneak off with the next three majors, before Neale Fraser got things back on track with the 1959 title at Forest Hills. Fraser and Rod Laver combined for three-quarters of the grand slam in 1960, and Roy Emerson won the first two of his twelve in 1961. The trio of Fraser, Laver, and Emerson won back the Davis Cup in 1959 and held it for four years.

It’s impossible to settle the question of how Cooper compared to the best of the pros at his peak. My Elo ratings make an attempt, but any mathematical approach is limited by the fact that the two groups of top players never mixed, with only one or two players switching sides each year–and always moving in the same direction.

Still, it’s worth considering what the algorithm has to say. Elo concludes that Cooper was in fact the best player in the world at the end of both 1957 and 1958. In 1957, he finished the season with a minor edge over both Mal Anderson and Ken Rosewall, and a slightly larger lead over Richard González and Lew Hoad. While that order is bit hard to swallow, at least it’s based on ample data: Rosewall played over 200 matches that year, and Hoad topped 120.

Cooper is the Elo #1 again at the end of 1958, after his 81-7 season in the amateur ranks. His year-end rating of 2,145 ranks 10th for the entire 1950s, behind only the strongest seasons of González, Hoad, Rosewall, Jack Kramer, Frank Sedgman, and Jaroslav Drobny. Elo gives him a wide lead over #2 Rosewall, who is followed by amateur Mervyn Rose, and then González and Anderson.

Maybe Cooper would’ve eventually figured out the pro game. Either way, the circuits were different enough that they can’t be compared directly. Cooper’s brief career leaves him far behind the likes of González, Hoad, and Rosewall in lists like these. But for that one short span, Ashley Cooper proved that he deserved the #1 ranking he first inherited under such odd circumstances. One of a long line of Golden Era stars from down under, Cooper delivered a 1958 season that ranks among the very best an Australian ever assembled.